Sony offers technology designed to improve picture quality, especially in dark areas. This technology automatically corrects the image on the TV screen to optimize the overall picture quality.
How X-tended Dynamic Range technology works
Each pixel in an image has a specific brightness and color. However, when capturing an image, even small differences in brightness or color between adjacent pixels can be difficult to distinguish. As a result, some details may be lost. Image processing software analyzes the color and brightness of each pixel and makes adjustments to align these elements to produce a clearer image. Your TV has a special program that evaluates the image and the level of gradation in dark areas. If it detects areas of the image with very dark tones or minimal differences in brightness that may be almost imperceptible, it makes a correction.
The viewer will notice a more balanced brightness, especially in the darker areas of the image.
This technology specifically targets dark areas (such as video shot in low light) and does not affect well-lit images. Despite some similarities to HDR technology, there is a key difference: HDR uses metadata accompanying the video to determine levels of brightness and contrast variation, while X-tended Dynamic Range works independently of such data, automatically adjusting the image at the TV level.
Aside from marketing considerations, the feature first appeared around 2013-2014, a period when high-quality digital content was limited. By 2019, Sony incorporated backlight control into the technology and began comparing the quality of the post-processed image to that of HDR. Essentially, this technology serves to equalize the brightness of an image when the original video quality leaves something to be desired.
By 2020, mentions of X-tended Dynamic Range in TV commercials have all but disappeared. This decline can be attributed to two main factors: from a marketing perspective, the technology cannot be promoted for more than five years, and there is less and less content that can give viewers a noticeable improvement over the original video quality.
