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Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays
- ibatindev 6y agoI think that HDR should also be between quotes.
- boardwaalk 6y agoHDR output is just a bright display with the appropriate tone mapping. If Apple has bright displays and appropriate tone mapping... is that not HDR?
- renewiltord 6y agoI wonder how a large organization does something like this successfully. Like you need your OS video driver team working with the application team and so on. My impression is that PMing this is really hard. And then each of the other guys is going to have an opinion that this shouldn't be done because it's so rare, etc. Something must be organizationally right for something like this capable engineering to have succeeded on such a barely noticeable feature. I love it when products casually have cool things like this. Not quite the same scope but IntelliJ's subpixel hinting option has each element of the drop down displaying with the hints that it describes. You don't have to pick an option to see it. You can just preview it off directly.
- nitrogen 6y agoColorimetry is standardized. The W3C has been asking the same questions about mixing HDR and SDR, as have various other standards orgs like SMPTE: https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-hdr/#Compositing-SDR-HDR https://drafts.csswg.org/css-color-hdr/#Compositing-SDR-HDR
- skavi 6y agodoesn’t make it easy to implement. Microsoft definitely hasn’t done great.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoApple has a functional organisation structure which is quite unusual for a corporation of that size. https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovation https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
- User23 6y agoThat’s a great example of learning the lesson of Conway’s Law.
- throwii 6y agoIt notes discussions between feature-group managers in the middle of the article.
- ambicapter 6y agoWhat are some other companies that also have this structure?
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoNot many. There was a very good comic about this a few years back. https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon-apple-facebook-microsoft/ https://ritholtz.com/2013/07/organizational-charts-of-amazon...
- 1-6 6y agoThat was drawn by Manu Cornet at Google. Here's his comic book about Google culture which includes that corp structure strip: https://www.amazon.com/Goomics-Googles-corporate-revealed-internal/dp/0988523841/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=goomics&qid=1607224518&sr=8-1 https://www.amazon.com/Goomics-Googles-corporate-revealed-in...
- londons_explore 6y agoI'm not sure it's as difficult as you suggest. As long as you don't let applications touch the pixel data of decoded images, it's all within libraries, and you can change the bit depth of buffers and change how they map to physical pixels easily. Most frameworks don't let applications touch pixel data without jumping through some hoops, because by restricting it you can implement things like lazy loading, GPU jpeg decoding GPU resizing, etc.
- mschuster91 6y ago> My impression is that PMing this is really hard. And then each of the other guys is going to have an opinion that this shouldn't be done because it's so rare, etc. It's easier when you control all parts of the stack. No way they could have pulled that one off with NVidia who were "famous" for breaking with Apple years ago when Apple demanded to code the drivers themselves... for valid reasons when one looks at the quality of their Windows and Linux drivers. The Windows ones are helluvalot buggy and the Linux ones barely integrate with Linux because NVidia refuses to follow standards.
- grishka 6y agoI still use a mac with an nvidia GPU, and the driver appears to be leaking memory a lot. Unless I reboot it about once a week, it becomes noticeably laggy.
- zokier 6y agoMixed HDR/SDR content is interesting problem. To me the example where thumbnail is presented with HDR color feels wrong, because it makes the thumbnail to stand out in a distracting way and seems highlighted in some way. But the iPhone example on the other hand looks really good; note how it seems like it switches from SDR to HDR display when the picture is selected. For desktop, maybe the simplest heuristic for choosing HDR/SDR is if the the window is fullscreen/maximized or not.
- skavi 6y ago> This EDR display philosophy is so important to Apple that they are willing to spend battery life on it. When you map “white” down to gray, you have to drive the LED backlight brighter for the same perceived screen brightness, using more power. Apple has your laptop doing this all the time, on the off chance that some HDR pixels come along to occupy that headroom. This is a bit misleading. The backlight isn’t at a higher level than necessary for sRGB content all the time, just whenever any HDR encoded videos or EDR apps are open. When you open an HDR video you can see the highlights getting brighter as the backlight gets pushed.
- alin23 6y ago> When you map “white” down to gray, you have to drive the LED backlight brighter for the same perceived screen brightness So that's why Lunar[1] reads a much higher brightness and makes all external monitors as bright as ten thousand suns when HDR content is played. I wonder if there's any way to detect this and read or compute the SDR brightness instead. [1] https://github.com/alin23/Lunar/issues/86 https://github.com/alin23/Lunar/issues/86
- Wowfunhappy 6y agoThank you. When I initially came to that paragraph, I went from being super impressed to being super concerned. Now I'm soundly back to impressed!
- crazygringo 6y ago> just whenever any HDR encoded videos or EDR apps are open Yup, I think this has to be the case. But the crazy thing is, I can't perceive any shift in UX brightness whatsoever, even a flicker, when I open/close an EDR video. I would have thought that there would be some slight mismatch at the moment the backlight is brightened and pixels are darkened -- whether it would be a close but not perfect brightness match, or a flicker while they're not synced. But nothing. As I mentioned in another comment, the only giveaway is that my cursor (mouse pointer) disappears for a second or two. I have to guess that adjusting its brightness happens at a different layer in the stack that can't be so precisely synced.
- 6y ago
- fortran77 6y ago> The company, long known for shipping high quality, color-accurate displays, This is simply not true; a lie. Everyone in Hollywood and the professional print world who needed color-accurate displays that could be calibrated were using HP Dreamcolor Displays or similar products from companies like BenQ ( For example: https://nofilmschool.com/2017/12/benq-sw271-color-management-monitor https://nofilmschool.com/2017/12/benq-sw271-color-management... ) No movie studio does professional color grading on anything else.
- hungryhobo 6y agoI mean my Sony a73 is not Alexa or Red, but doesn't stop it being a high quality camera :)
- xvector 6y agoThe scope here is consumer products.
- fortran77 6y agoMaybe, but I just don't like seeing the lie that "Hollywood uses Macs." Of course, the PAs and screenwriters do, but movie editors, color graders, and digital SFX folks don't. And, of course, render farms don't.
- acdha 6y agoThe entire field is larger than movie studio post production. Apple wasn’t trying to get in that space until recently but their displays were well above average for less demanding users for decades. There was an entire business getting this setup for Windows print/design/photography shops during the era where support was tedious and error prone.
- kuschku 6y agoBtw, if you want pretty much the same specs with native 10-bit support and 1000 nits peak brightness for pretty much the same price, the UP2718Q has been discounted quite a bit recently (I got one for myself)
- ineedasername 6y agoI think I must be some weird outlier on HDR. I recently upgraded to a display that supports it, and when I turn it on, everything just looks darker to me. As though the brightness went to half at the same time that contrast was cranked up high. Playing with color and exposure and other settings just made things worse.
- mceachen 6y agoHDR needs a bunch of things to work correctly: 1) the software needs to render with the correct gamut profile (typically "P3.display") 2) the OS needs to have a reasonable color profile for the display that knows about the higher gamut 3) the display needs to be in the correct mode to interpret and render in the correct gamut. My LG HDR400 display only has 1 obvious setting for HDR as a "quick" setting, but it behaves like what you're said, and that just drops gamma.
- cptskippy 6y agoLaptops shipping with HDR displays don't even get it right.
- ineedasername 6y agoIf I'm on a standard Win10 Pro box, any idea what I should look for? I'm running a amd vega 64.
- rebuilder 6y agoIt sounds like a color profile mismatch. Specifically, it sounds like you're viewing linear light on something like an srgb profile without the proper color conversion. If pumping gamma up to 2.2 makes things look more or less normal, that's a strong indication it's an srgb issue.
- dannyw 6y agoIt sounds like your display is not really HDR but is just advertised it. Monitors that are IPS (i.e. most monitors) with HDR are more mostly fake. If you want real HDR600, try the Samsung Odyssey G7; but even that does not have full-array local dimming (which you'd expect to spend $2k for).
- AnssiH 6y agoWhen still talking about mixed SDR+HDR content on a HDR display having differently mapped whites, the article says: > it’s strange and new, and possibly unique to Apple. But that is exactly how Windows 10 does it with HDR displays, too. So not really unique to Apple. To the article's benefit, it did say "possibly" :) I'm using Win 10 myself with an HDR display, and HDR white appears brighter than "desktop" white just like in the article photo. There is also a slider in Win10 HDR settings that allows you to bring SDR/"desktop" white up if you wish to oversaturate SDR.
- noobquestion81 6y agoapple uses this technique on non-HDR displays tho.
- dannyw 6y agoThe "non-HDR" displays are actually high-quality, wide gamut displays. They may not have been certified for HDR when they were made, but it's quite likely to be HDR400 capable.
- whynotminot 6y agoAs far as I'm aware, Apple hasn't released a display on any device with less than 400 nits brightness in years. So HDR400 capability would at least make some sense at a surface level.
- AnssiH 6y agoYep, that part might be unique to Apple. Possibly.
- Androider 6y agoThe Windows HDR implementation is complete crap, exactly because they don't have have full control of the hardware stack as Apple does and can't change all the monitor settings like they would need to. When you toggle HDR on Windows, the desktop becomes dull gray and desaturated exactly because they pull down the previous desktop brightness to something less than 255. So you have to then adjust your monitor's brightness up to compensate. The monitor's brightness effectively sets the upper cap of the HDR brightness, so let's say your brightness was set at 50% before, now you've got to fiddle with the monitor to boost the screen brightness to 100% to allow HDR to function, and to achieve your previous desktop white brightness (you'll probably also have to adjust the software "desktop white" point slider you mentioned, since MS has no clue what the correct monitor brightness and SDR pull down amount should be, so good luck matching your previous desktop colors and brightness). In my experience very few people successfully manage to setup their Windows HDR correctly, and even if you do there's no way to "seamlessly" switch between the two modes (which you have to do since tons of stuff on Windows doesn't work properly when HDR mode is enabled). I haven't checked Surface or other MS hardware, perhaps they're able to do something more clever there? What Apple does, is that when your display brightness is 50% and you display HDR content, the HDR content will seamlessly appear at a brightness somewhere between 75% to 100% of the maximum screen brightness. That is a seamless HDR effect, giving you the whiter than white experience next to your other windows that just works.
- amluto 6y agoDoes anyone have a sample photo with brighter-than-white whites that isn’t behind a registration wall?
- vmokry 6y agoSure, here are some from my HDR Dell monitor: https://ibb.co/M25sXX1 https://ibb.co/M25sXX1 https://ibb.co/RcM62TD https://ibb.co/RcM62TD
- kevingadd 6y ago"On these non-HDR displays, Apple has remapped “white” to something less than 255-255-255, leaving headroom for HDR vales, should they be called for" What is the source for this? I don't see any justification for this claim in the article. There are plenty of ways to implement this feature that don't involve permanently throwing out dynamic range on all your SDR panels. I'm not even convinced from reading this that they aren't HDR panels to begin with - the idea of an iPhone having a 9-bit or 10-bit panel in it isn't that strange to me, and while that wouldn't be enough for like Professional-Grade HDR it's enough that you could pair it with dynamic backlight control and convince the average user that it's full HDR. Considering Apple controls the whole stack and uses a compositor there's nothing stopping them from compositing to a 1010102 or 111110 framebuffer and then feeding that higher-precision color data to the panel and controlling the backlight. Since they control the hardware they can know how bright it will be (in nits) at various levels.
- vr46 6y agoMy favourite and most succinct comment on this is that “this one goes to 11”
- dannyw 6y agoDid Apple really remap white with macOS Catalina on Macbook Pros, and no one noticed? For some reason, I find that hard to believe. But it also makes me believe in the vertical integration powers of Apple: just think about this trickery on Windows!
- izacus 6y agoNo need to "think" about this on Windows - Windows calls this "Windows HD Color" and it's right there in settings as well. For awhile now. (If HDR display is connected, that option is replaced with a HDR on/off switch.)
- gruez 6y agoWhat are the requirements for it? The section is there but I can't see the toggle, on both SDR screens.
- sercand 6y agoI just tested the sample file provided in the article at my Macbook with QuickTime, IIAN, and VLC. I can confirm the result in the article but it is Quick Time only. Colors in IIAN and VLC are not as bright as in the QuickTime.
- Synaesthesia 6y agoI've noticed for a while that videos look different in Quicktime, vs VLC, MPV and other players. The colors are less saturated in QT.
- bredren 6y agoI’ve had the XDR Pro Display since June, and use it primarily for dev. I just trusted Apple in their focus on this direction. Suffice it to say I am very happy with it. What I like about conclusions of this piece is it points to how strategic Apple is thinking in its leverage due to the breadth of distribution of advanced hardware and software. Apple is able to set entire new standards of expectation for customers that are _very_ hard for competitors to follow. While competitors fixate on some single feature like night photo quality, Apple is also subtly chipping away at something like this.
- blauditore 6y ago> Apple is able to set entire new standards of expectation for customers that are _very_ hard for competitors to follow. The cheaper version of this display has a price tag of $5k, the more expensive one $6k. I never spent even remotely as much money on a display, so I cannot speak from first-hand experience. But a quick search for graphics-design displays yields several competitor products that have similar or better specs, at generally even lower price tags. Apple does many things, but certainly not bleeding-edge innovation. Of course it likes to sell its products as such, but I guess that's just how marketing works.
- dijit 6y agoWhen the XDR came out it was competing with monitors that were 40,000 USD and up. (With some compromises like the stand which is just an art piece and the viewing angles being squiff). If the competition is now priced competitively then that’s very good for consumers.
- kuschku 6y agoThe competition was also before the XDR similarly priced. Asus had 2 or 3 at that price point, and Apple had the XDR. And then there's the Dell UP2718Q, almost entirely the exact same specs, but only 4K, at 1600€. Released 2017, years before the XDR.
- 6y ago
- crazygringo 6y agoWow, that's crazy, it actually works -- just tried out the sample videos in QuickTime on my 2016 13" MBP (P3 gamut, running Big Sur) and confirmed working. Basically: if I set my display to ~75% brightness and open the video, the whites in the video are 100% brightness, way brighter than #FFF interface white on the rest of my screen. But if I increase my display brightness to 100%, the whites in the video are the same as the interface white, because it obviously can't go any brighter. If I decrease my display brightness to 50%, the whites in the video are no longer at maximum 100% brightness, maybe more like 75%. But it's also kind of buggy -- after messing around with system brightness a bit, the video stops being brighter and I've got to quit QuickTime and restart it again for effect. Also, opening and closing the video file makes my cursor disappear for a couple seconds! I'm wondering if it switches from hardware dimming to software dimming when the video is opened and closed, and if that switch has to do with the cursor disappears. If it is, though it's flawlessly undetectable in terms of brightness -- the interface white and grays don't change at all. Interestingly confirming it: taking a screenshot of the video while screen is at 75% brightness show massive brightness clipping in the video, since it's "overexposed" in the interface's color range. But taking a screenshot while screen brightness is 100% shows no clipping, because the video is no longer "overexposed" to the interface. I'm just so surprised I had utterly no idea macOS worked like this. I'd never heard of this feature until now.
- Budabellly 6y agoIf you pop open Digital Color Meter app (macOS system util), are there any differences between the whites in the video and the #fff interface whites?
- dreamer7 6y agoJust tried this on my Macbook Pro. It was easier to just go to YouTube and search for HDR videos than downloading the sample in the article. Digital Color Meter shows both UI white and video white as exactly #fff despite the video white being much brighter! Even at full screen brightness, the video white was noticeably brighter
- cmroanirgo 6y ago
- Animats 6y agoNow browsers will have to be modified to support colors in excess of 255. Flashing ads will be brighter than ever!
- tosh 6y agoHigh Dynamic Range and Wide Gamut Color on the Web https://w3c.github.io/ColorWeb-CG/ https://w3c.github.io/ColorWeb-CG/
- loh 6y agoIt's amazing to me that there are still people out there who don't use adblockers in 2020. The web is unbelievably painful to browse without an adblocker. I've also gotten into the habit of using uBlock Origin to kill all of the "Accept Cookies" type popups without ever clicking accept. Those are just as intolerable as ads to me.
- raindropm 6y agoI think most users never even heard about Adblockers or how it will improve their web browsing life considerably. It's the thing people never know they want. On other story, I give my junior advice that she should install adblocker on her browser, her reply was: "How can I watch the commercial then?" Umm...OKAY. My assumption: 1) people just didn't know better or 2) they actually loves those flashing ads all along
- nagisa 6y agoThis reminds me of a recent submission about Wayland colour management and HDR work: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159592 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25159592. In particular https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/swick/wayland-protocols/-/blob/color/unstable/color-management/color.rst https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/swick/wayland-protocols/-/blo... was linked which discussed how a wayland compositor would have to display mixed "HDR" and SDR content on the same display. This document even has references to EDR. Ultimately this would end up achieving a similar result as what's described in the blog post here. If you're interested in the technical details on what may be necessary to achieve something like this, the wayland design document might be a good read.
- gardaani 6y agoMacs can also play HDR content on external displays, such as HDR televisions and projectors. This document lists Mac models supporting HDR: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980 I seems that the new MacBook Air with M1 can't play HDR content on external displays. :(
- ArchOversight 6y agoWhat makes you say that the MacBook Air with M1 can't play HDR content on external displays? The MacBook Air with M1 has two USB 4 ports. USB 4 is Thunderbolt 3 + some extra bits. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201736 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201736 for information.
- zimpenfish 6y agoThe "Mac models that support HDR" table on https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980 says that MacBook Airs introduced after 2018 can only do SDR on external displays - if it doesn't include the 2020 Air, they'd surely have called that out?
- ArchOversight 6y agoYou are right. I totally missed the SDR/HDR distinction because it is a single character difference. My apologies!
- qubitcoder 6y agoIt could be a function of their integrated graphics approach with the M1 (SoC), as opposed to simply having the right ports. That's just a guess, however.
- xenonite 6y agois this practically confirmed?
- jonplackett 6y agoI noticed this 'extra bright whites in video' effect on my iPhone 12 just after upgrading. I had to go and shoot 'normal' + HDR video of the same thing a few times back and forth to be sure I knew what I was seeing. The first thing you think is, how was I OK with this terrible standard video to begin with? The HDR version just looks SO MUCH better and the standard looks so flat next to it. Like comparing an old non HDR photo with an HDR one.
- boromi 6y agoIt seems to me that Microsoft really makes no effort to improve subtle aspects of Windows and hardware integration. In fact, their OS is in such shambles and is a disoriented mess with respect to UI consistency. They introduced Vista, Metro, and now Fluent. Yet there's almost no coherence and the UI is now a mish-mash of XP, Metro, and Fluent era elements. By the time they announce their next UI, you can bet you'll now see yet another ingredient added to the jumbled soup. It really is beyond belief that an organization with so many employees can fail to adhere to a uniform vision and standard and focus on correcting details. I'm a life long Windows and Android user. But honestly, seeing articles like this and how smooth the UI on macOS and uniformly they apply new updates and UI changes makes me extremely jealous and resentful that Microsoft is so bad at something so basic. Features are great, but users at their start point interact with UI first. They need to fix that before anything else. Now they want to give you the option to run Android apps on Windows through emulation. This just going to create a bigger jumbled mess.
- paulryanrogers 6y agoApple has gone through their share of UI fads and APIs. And by dropping backward compatibility more often users see less variation.
- ChuckNorris89 6y ago>It seems to me that Microsoft really makes no effort to improve subtle aspects of Windows and hardware integration. Latest Windows 10 iteration is by far the snappiest OS I've used in a long time since it uses GPU acceleration for the desktop window manager. You can check this in task manager. The icing on the cake, if you gave a laptop with 2 GPUS(Optimus) is when you can run a demanding 3D app like a game in windowed mode in parallel with other stuff like watching videos on youtube and you can see in task manager how windows uses the external GPU to render the game and the integrated GPU to accelerate your web browser, all running butterly smooth. >In fact, their OS is in such shambles and is a disoriented mess with respect to UI consistency. True, but that's what you get with 30 years worth of built in backwards compatibility. I can run a copy of Unreal Tournament 1999 that was just copied off an old PC with no sweat right after ripping and tearing in Doom Eternal. Can you run 20 year old software on current Apple without emulation? Apple can afford to innovate in revolutionary ways when it dumps older baggage whenever it feels like it and start from a fresh drawing board without looking back, see intel to apple silicon transition. In 2 years x86 apps will be considered legacy/obsolete on Mac hardware. Microsoft can't really do this with windows so yeah, it's a mess of new GUI elements for the simple stuff and windows 2000 era GUI elements for the deep pro settings. The advantage is that if you're an old time Windows user you can easily find your way using the "old" settings and if you're new to windows you can do most configs through the "new" GUI without touching the scary looking "old" settings.
- Rapzid 6y agoThe industry is in a very strange place right now. HDR monitors are both quite expensive and unimpressive compared to the HDR OLED TVs.. For the 5-6k that this display from Apple costs, I would certainly expect it to be an OLED display at LEAST. But it's not. How is this the best we can get and it's NOT OLED? Dimming zones for 6k? I don't understand what's going on, I just want a nice OLED monitor that will fit on my monitor arm. I'll even pay the same price that you can get an AMAZING 55" OLED TV from LG for; 1500-2k.
- cheschire 6y agoOLED isn't super useful on computer screens where elements stay in a static location for a long time due to burn in. Also the amount of bright colors used in computer interfaces would cause some significant discomfort. And I'm not sure how legitimate this claim is, but I've read before that OLED suffers from dead pixels at a higher rate than other screen types, but don't take that too seriously without proof.
- account42 6y ago> OLED isn't super useful on computer screens where elements stay in a static location for a long time due to burn in. I see this repeated a lot. Do you have any numbers/images on actual burnin in OLED screens. Would be interesting to know how long an OLED screen remains useable when used as a PC monitor. Or to put it another way: Burn in does not seem to be enough of a concern to prevent Samsung/etc from puttin OLED screens into phones. > Also the amount of bright colors used in computer interfaces would cause some significant discomfort. The entire point of Apple's solution here is that UI's max brightness is not the display's true max brightness.
- cheschire 6y agoIndeed, burn-in tests almost feel anecdotal because they involve no more than several TVs. We don't have the MTTF type numbers for pixels like we demand for hard drives. The problem with contrast is more pronounced on my OLED tv than on my HDR LED monitor. I've also noticed on my TV if I watch netflix with standard size subtitles, the brightness overwhelms the lower part of the image on dark TV shows. I suspect this is less of an issue on LED monitors only because the contrast is not so extreme. Again, all anecdotes. I do like OLED though, enough to make it my priority TV feature.
- floatingatoll 6y agoI have one regret from this article, and that’s the explanation that sRGB hex color #ffffff (255, 255, 255) is being remapped. It’s not. The OS simply isn’t restricting the display pipeline to sRGB anymore, and that allows content which exceeds sRGB to do so. #ffffff is L=100%. What is L=800%? It exists in HDR content, and we can’t just make the web color #ffffff a dim gray to the eye. We must start thinking in terms of HSL or LAB or even RGBL, and consider that L > 100% is where HDR peak brightness lives. HDR’s color space exceeds the luminosity that sRGB hex triplets can represent, and remapping HDR color spaces into sRGB hex gives you horrendous banding and requires complex gamma functions. The CSS colors spec is finalizing on this, but essentially we’re at the last days of hex codes being a great way to express color on the web. They’ll remain good as a last resort, but it’s time to move a step forward. Apple is pinning sRGB hex #ffffff to “paper white” brightness because the hex color specification can’t encompass the full spectrum of monitors anymore. The different between #ffffff and #fefefe can be enormous on a display with 1800 nits of peak brightness, and if you map #ffffff to peak brightness, you burn out people’s eyes with every single web page on today’s legacy sRGB-color Internet (including Hacker News!). That’s why HDR has “paper white” at around 400 lumens in calibration routines. So, then, sRGB hex colors have no way to express “significantly brighter than paper white #ffffff”, and UI elements have little reason to use this extended opportunity space - but HDR content does, and it’s nice to see Apple allowing it through to the display controller. But there’s no way to make use HDR in web content - other than embedded images and videos - if we continue thinking of color in terms of hex codes. This insistence that we remap hex codes into thousands of nits of spectrum is why web colors in Firefox on an HDR display make your eyes hurt (such as the HN topbar): it’s rescaling the web to peak brightness rather than to paperwhite, and the result is physically traumatic to our vision system. Human eyes are designed for splashes of peak brightness, but when every web page is pouring light out of your monitor at full intensity, it causes eye strain and fatigue. Don’t be like Firefox in this regard. “But how do we conceive of color, if not in hex codes?” is a great question, and it’s a complicated question. In essence you select color and brightness independent of each other, and then make sure that it looks good when peak brightness is low, and doesn’t sear your eyes when peak brightness is high. If this interests you, and you’d like to start preparing for a future where colors can be dimmer or brighter than sRGB hex #FFFFFF, here are a couple useful links to get you started: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22467744 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22467744 As a final note, there are thermal reasons why peak brightness can be so much higher than paperwhite: your display can only use so much power for its thermal envelope. Yes, HDR displays have thermal envelopes. So overusing peak white, such as scaling #ffffff to the wrong brightness, can actually cause the total brightness of the display to drop when it hits thermal protections, while simultaneously wasting battery and hurting your users’ eyes.
- bamboleo 6y agoI had noticed this on my iPhone 11 Pro and I hate it. HDR doesn’t give you “whiter than white”, it just adds more steps of gray. White is white. White on a display is the brightest point the display can display. What Apple is doing, as the article explained, is showing regular white as gray. That’s not cool, that just stupid. It’s exactly what TVs at Best Buy do when showing SD vs HD content: They ruin the regular image just so you can see the difference. The issue is that my monitor is not a demo display, it’s what I use sometimes in daylight, and I’d very much appreciate that extra brightness that Apple takes away from me. You know what this means for you? Everything you see and watch on your computer is not a bright as it could be. On an LCD screen that’s a big deal because suddenly your blacks are brighter (because of the backlight at 100%) and your whites are dimmer (because Apple saves brightness on the off chance that you have HDR content)
- jiveturkey 6y agowow. no one is calling this the hoax it is. it’s reducing contrast on the SDR so that the HDR content is subjectively brighter. i mean it’s fine and all, but you’re not seeing HDR on a non HDR screen. you wouldn’t be able to use it for color grading.
- strogonoff 6y agoThe author is rightly excited about HDR, but could be slightly overstating its effect in some examples. > But at key parts of the story, certain colors eek outside of that self-imposed SDR container, to great effect. In a very emotional scene, brilliant pinks and purples explode off the screen — colors that not only had been absent from the film before that moment, but seemed altogether outside the spectrum of the story’s palette. Such a moment would not be possible without HDR. I think the author knows that this is a special case of the effect where you limit color palette to some range of colors for a duration of the film and then exceed that range in places—no HDR in particular fundamentally needed to make this possible. True, HDR can give a greater effect in absolute colorimetric terms when full palette is revealed, but the perceived magnitude depends on how restricted the original palette was prior to the reveal, and how masterfully the effect is used in general.
- thadk 6y agoHow might we access this HDR in animated/interactive javascript data visualizations?
- hyko 6y agoIn case anyone is worried about getting free LASIK eye surgery from this at night, the effect seems to dramatically roll off at very low brightness levels.
- jonplackett 6y agoI think this same thing happens when displaying HDR photographs. The main photo taken has much brighter highlights, but the rest of the Live Photo frames don’t.