The PHABRIX Qx Series (Qx, QxL and QxP), now supports the detection and analysis of SMPTE Full Range video standards.
The units use the definitions for Narrow, Full Protected and Full Range as defined in the recommendations SMPTE RP 2077 Full-Range Image Mapping and EBU R 103 Video Signal Tolerance in Digital Television Systems.
PHABRIX Principal Software Engineer John Heywood elaborated on this advancement by the company.
“For each RGB or YCbCr color channel in a 10-Bit video signal there are 1024 possible values, from 0 to 1023,” he says. “Traditionally, 0-100% of all color combinations use only 85% (87.5% for Chroma) of the available digital code values. In the Qx Series, Full Range (FR) allows us to use the whole 100% of digital code values, thus significantly increasing the number of unique colors that we can represent.”
“If you’re a content creator, or if you’re an OTT provider you don’t need to worry about SMPTE Range; you’d rather maximise the image quality of your content,” Heywood explains. “You could use a 12-Bit instead of 10-Bit depth to give you 64 times more unique colors. If you switch to 12-Bit Full Range, however, you can have a massive 100 times more unique color values available compared to the 10-Bit SMPTE range. If you’re providing broadcast content, you can be confident that your Rec.2020 12-Bit Full Range media can be converted to broadcast format and reduced to SMPTE range while preserving as much detail as possible.”
