The 8K Association updates specifications and incorporates new members

The 8K Association (8KA) has released an updated performance specification for the Certified Brands program adding new decoding requirements, new image quality metrics, and a game mode.

The 8KA has also announced the addition of new members. Among them are Prime Video, the content creation company 4by4, UL testing service provider, and TV manufacturer Changhong who rejoins the organization.

“Prime Video was the first subscription service to launch HDR back in 2015, and we are obsessed with offering our customers high audiovisual quality,” he noted. Ben Waggoner, Amazon's leading video specialist. “We want to team up with 8KA to identify whether content benefits from native 8K and 4Kp120 delivery, and the technical requirements to deliver those benefits to customers.”

TV buyers looking for TVs that offer four times the resolution of 4K TVs and meet the high-performance standards of the 8KA Certified program will benefit from new, expanded performance requirements for 8K TVs launching this year. The 8KA has already certified more than 80 models of televisions to date.

In addition to existing requirements for resolution, luminance, color and connectivity standards that ensure powerful big-screen performance, the association's logo program now recognizes a broader set of video decoding standards that will promote greater availability of 8K streaming content.

The 8K Association is also a pioneer in the use of Ambient Contrast Ratio (ACR) as a new way to help ensure good image quality performance in different ambient lighting conditions. For example, when the room is dark, the TV will offer the brightest colors and highest contrast.

But as the ambient lighting, these two image quality elements decrease. This can be overcome with brighter televisions and lower reflectance television display technology. The 8KA ACR test measures the TV reflectivity with a test pattern in bright and dim lighting conditions and establishes performance levels in each case that the television must exceed. ACR is an important factor for TVs from the users' perspective, regardless of the resolution.

“We have been discussing ACR as a new element for more than a year and it has finally been included in V2.1.0,” he says KG Lee, chair of the technology working group. “Although passing the ACR specification is now optional for certification, members are required to provide the data so we can optimize the pass/fail criteria for a future mandatory requirement.”

“Using ACR as a metric allows us to better manage the viewer experience in the different ambient light conditions that we all have at home,” he adds. Pete Sellar, president of the Certification Working Group at the 8KA. “These and other efforts we are putting into developing the certified specification should give consumers confidence that certified 8K TVs are compatible with the latest advances in television viewing.”

The revised specification also includes new requirements for the game mode, such as support for Automatic Low Latency Mode (ALLM) and Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) via the HDMI 2.1 interface. Gaming on 8K TVs is expected to be a major use case, so the 8K Association wants to help ensure the best performance.