Are Nits = brightness or peak brightness?

filmofil

Hello everyone
I was watching review of new ULED tv by Hisens the U9A model and they claim it have over 2000 nits. Now i do not understand this. Is NIT = brightness or peak brightness?

Im watching my tv and on displayspecification it has 300 brightness but 1200 static. Which one are nits? I talk about model 55sk7900 model.

Now i just compared Sony XE9005 model and it has brightness 550 and peak is 900. Static crontrast is 4700.

So what is NIT actualy? Is it peak brightness or brightness or something else? I know it should be candel per square inch but which one, peak or?

I cant belive that Hisense has over 8x more NITS then SUHD 7900 uk from LG or almost 3x the Sony XE900 series.

EndlessWaves

nit is industry shorthand for candela/square meter, a unit of brightness. As far as I'm aware that's all, it doesn't refer to a specific method of measuring brightness.

Backlight brightness is easy to create. You can easily stick in a 2000cd/m² light behind a TV. You can buy a torch that bright for under a tenner. Getting that light with a good colour gamut and so on makes it a bit more high tech, but it's not the limiting factor.

The tricky bit is increasing the contrast sufficient to apply that brightness in actual scenes. This requires control over the backlight brightness in small enough areas (zones) that the extra brightness can be applied to the small bright spots on screen that are requesting it, such as light sources or glints of sunlight on polished metal.

If you can't do that it's only going to get used on rare occasions for shock value. Strobes, explosions, dawn and so on.


In short, the only brightness values with any meaning are real scene measurements.

filmofil

WOW
Very detailed answer, everything i needed to know. But i do have a question now, how do i see what kind of "quality of brightness" does my tv have? In this case LG SK model 7900 or 8000. I cant find any test and info on official website does not give much info.

EndlessWaves

HDTV Polska is the best test site I've found, but they've only reviewed the SK9500 so far this year.

Rtings are a Canadian site that test the brightness in real content, but only a single scene so the figure varies between the top and bottom values from the four scenes HDTVPolska tests so take it with a good margin.

Rtings have tested the TV that goes under SK8000 in North America, although I don't know how similar it is to the SK7900 here:
LG SK8000 Review (49SK8000PUA, 55SK8000PUA, 65SK8000PUA) - RTINGS.com
Peak Brightness of TVs: Max luminosity and HDR highlights

LG are generally not very good in this area, they don't seem to be putting the investment into backlight development - presumably because they're currently forecasting that OLED will become capable enough to replace it within the next decade or so.

Rtings colour volume figures are also worth a look as they determine the brightness of coloured elements in comparison to white. Low colour volume means the TV can only reach it's top brightness for a more limited colour palette. This is why Samsung's Q-series TVs are getting some good reviews for HDR despite a limited brightness, because they can sustain it even for richer colours.

filmofil

Much appriciated. Thank you.

Stu MSD

Just a BTTT purely to say thanks for the information in this thread.
Very interesting.

Kend3591

Definition below
When a part is illuminated by an LED light, luminance provides a measure of the amount of light reflected from a surface and indicates the brightness of light emitted or reflected from a surface. This can be measured in candelas/square meter (cds/m2) or foot-lamberts (fLs).

EndlessWaves

So is it emitted or reflected?

Although I'm not sure what the point you're making is. He wasn't asking the scientific definition of the term, but what behaviour it was measuring when used in TV specs.