Amazon Prime Delivers Thursday Night Football in Stunning HDR
September 21, 2023
Author: Jeff Yurek
Thursday Night Football is back and Amazon Prime is upgrading the experience for fans this year by broadcasting all games in the lifelike High Dynamic Range (HDR) video format. HDR video delivers a wider palette of colors, covering 25% more of the colors found in the natural world than an old-fashioned HDTV broadcast. So, with HDR, colors on your screen will be more realistic and closer to watching the game live but will you really notice the difference while watching an NFL game?
We thought it would be fun to see just how wide the color gamut of a TNF game might be. So we broke out our trusty spectroradiometer, a couple of old football jerseys, and gathered some data…
Measuring the chromaticity of San Francisco 49ers’ red with our PR 655 spectroradiometer
Tonight’s week 3 game features the San Francisco 49ers hosting the New York Giants. We happen to be based in Silicon Valley, just a few miles from Levi’s stadium where the Niners play, so we had plenty of Niners jerseys on hand to test. Nobody in the building would admit to being a Giants fan and so we had to rely on some math to derive the chromaticity from their official team colors. We used teamcolorcodes.com as our source for official team colors.
Interestingly, the Niners and Giants have a color in common so there are only three colors for this game:
49er and Giant Red: Pantone PMS 187 C
49er Gold: Pantone PMS 872 C
Giants Dark Blue: Pantone PMS 2758 C
For the Giants blue, we did not have a sample so we converted CMYK values to XYZ with a D65 illuminant assumed and then converted XYZ to xyY chromaticity. The result of those measurements and calculations are plotted below:
As you can see, the red and gold uniform colors are reasonably well contained within the chromaticity gamut of an HDTV broadcast. However, the Giant's Dark Blue is right on the edge. This color likely benefits from the HDR format since it will be comfortably in-gamut for any competent HDR TV. Of course, many other colors that are likely to benefit from the HDR experience, from post-touchdown fireworks to graphics overlays, will be featured on the TNF broadcast.
For the best TNF HDR viewing experience, you’ll need a TV that can deliver a wide color gamut with great contrast and a fast built-in Prime Video app. As the “Q in QLED” Quantum Dot company, we’re more than a little biased but we really like Amazon’s Omni QLED series of Fire TVs. These sets deliver punchy, accurate color with an awesome Prime Video experience, starting at $379 for a 43”.
Next week’s matchup features the Detroit Lions at the Green Bay Packers. We’ve ordered up a set of Pantone color swatches and, if fans are interested to know more about the gamut of each game, we’ll post an updated measurement each week. So, keep an eye on Nanosys’ social feeds for an update on the color gamut of next week’s game where we’ll find out if Detroit’s famous “Honolulu Blue” is a true HDR color.
Special thanks to Ian Khaw for color metrology and math support!
Updated 9/27/23 with Week 4 matchup.