Reinventing the colour TV

Mitsubishi and others are promoting a technical standard that's expected to greatly expand the colour palette on televisions.

The standard -- elegantly called xvYCC -- is meant to update the televised colour spectrum for the digital age. The current standard, BT.709-5, defines the ranges of reds, greens and blues that TVs can display. The new standard will broaden the range of colours, adding shades of cyan or bright green, which should lead to more natural-looking colours.

"You'll be able to see richer and more colours," said Vik Murty, senior manager for product marketing at Mitsubishi Digital Electronics, America, during a presentation in San Francisco on Wednesday at audio and entertainment tech specialist Dolby Laboratories. "This opens a new set of colours that no one has ever seen on a TV before."

The existing standard works for most TVs, but it constrains the capabilities of LCD televisions with light-emitting diode (LED) backlights and rear-projection TVs with digital light-processing technology, Murty said.

Mitsubishi plans to incorporate the standard into TVs from April. Broadcasters are also starting to build xvYCC-compliant systems so they can deliver programming that takes advantage of the standard. Others are working on it too: Sony showed off small screens with the technology earlier this year.

Mitsubishi also plans to release a TV that uses lasers, rather than lightbulbs or LEDs, as a light source in late 2007, he added.

The new standard will further be enhanced by Deep Color, an existing technology that smoothes out the fine gradients between shades of colours. In some older digital TVs, viewers can see faint bands in a colour field as the colours get lighter or darker. In a TV with Deep Color, the bands disappear and images in shadows become clearer.

The acronym xvYCC is a rough equivalent for the standard more formally called Extended YCC Colorimetry for Video Applications. The standard is governed by the International Electrotechnical Commission.

Next year should be a big one for improving the picture quality of digital TVs. Several companies are expected to release LCD televisions that will get rid of ghosting and the blurriness often associated with the devices. Toshiba will also try to ship the first SED (surface conduction electron-emitter display) televisions, which use a new standard the company says will provide a better picture than plasma or LCD.