Sony introduces new line of TVs
Sony’s new Bravia XR TVs are all about ‘cognitive intelligence’
Sony has long been a leader in television manufacturing. While there are many reasons for this, one reason really stands out. It’s the image processing. You see, the TV’s picture is made up of three main components: the imaging panel, the light source, and the electronic circuitry, which includes the image processor.
This week, as part of the virtual CES 2021, Consumer Electronics Show, Sony announced a new line of TV called XR. There are a few things you should know right away… These TVs aren’t out yet. (As of this writing) The announcement is really just saying what direction Sony is going with regard to future televisions. The other thing to know is that this new line of TVs, while certainly sleeker looking don’t do much to enhance the user experience with regard to audio.
The real upgrade here is the processor. Sony calls the new processor “XR with cognitive intelligence” as if to convey that it’s better than Samsung’s new “Artificial Intelligence” processors but really what it is, is a set of human written algorithms that allow the processor to detect what content may be in the scene and adjust the color, contrast and sharpness accordingly. I would like to note that Sony’s use of the term “Cognitive Intelligence” and the way Samsung uses the term “Artificial Intelligence” is really just marketing hype. The processors are better, yes. But they aren’t sentient life on a piece of silicon.
Sony paints an example of how the technology works as follows: The scene begins with a person entering frame, facing the camera. Using facial recognition technology, the processor detects there is a human in the scene and makes adjustments for skin tone, possibly at the expense of the background. Once the person exits the scene, other objects in the scene take priority and are analysed for adjustment. Many different objects in a scene can be identified, analysed and adjusted, such as a blue sky that needs a smoother gradation or high-contrast pin-point light sources as one would see looking at stars against the blackness of space. Still more examples would be large patches of green color from a football field would suggest a sharpening adjustment would make the image better during a football game. The gist is, Sony is attempting to identify objects in the scene and make image adjustments accordingly rather than just making adjustments based on average numerical values.
A great example of twinkling stars against dark space can be found in the new Pixar film, Soul.
Sony revolutionized advanced image processing with it’s X1 processor back in 2015. The image processor is a different thing than the mainboard SoC or “System on a Chip”. The latter is responsible for how fast the Android TV interface is, the graphics processing, the video encoding & decoding and HDMI feature support.
The image processor is responsible for Sony’s proprietary image upscaling, HDR processing, noise reduction and color management systems. 2 years after the X1 was determined to be successful, they released the X1 Extreme. Now the image processing was done on a frame by frame basis. You can imagine the processing power required to render 24 frames per second, or more! A year later, in 2018, the X1 Ultimate came out. Now, with even more processing power, Sony was able to evaluate and adjust more than each individual movie frame. They could look at the individual objects inside each frame and adjust the scene on an “object-level”. This was called Object Based HDR Remastering. It worked by identifying objects in the scene and making adjustment calculations based on that object rather that the whole scene. This was particularly helpful in keeping saturated colors during scenes that were backlit.
Now that Sony came this far, it made sense for them to try to identify what each object in the scene actually is. This allows Sony to assign an importance value to the object before image adjustment. The algorithms used to determine both the object and it’s value is what Sony means by “Cognitive Intelligence” and “Cognitive Processing”.
Sony introduced its Bravia XR series of TVs during CES 2021. These new televisions incorporate technologies such as its Cognitive Processing, 8K, Android TV, HDMI 2.1, IMAX Enhanced and Netflix Calibrated Mode.
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