8 ms·
Trying to get past the 500 nits limit of the MacBook Pro (and failing)
- randyrand 5y agoIMO the best approach is developer opt-in. - developers render UI to an HDR buffer - developers standardize on a open-source brightness slider in the Menu Bar - or, each app has an individual 'brightness' slider. It's a lot of work and a shame that Apple is making us to do this, but if a handful of apps start to do it then perhaps they'll come to their senses and just let users control their own damn screen brightness.
- MauranKilom 5y agoFor those wondering what a nit is (in this context): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela_per_square_metre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candela_per_square_metre
- amitp 5y agoI was amazed by how bright this page could get, on both Macbook and iPhone — https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ — and I want to figure out how to use this superwhite on my interactive tutorials. But as far as I can see, canvas, svg, and webgl can't access it.
- jbirer 5y agoNuts, I clicked the brightness toggle to bring it lower than 100% and it was already at 50%
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- eyelidlessness 5y agoHDR works for the Photos app. Though it doesn’t work for social apps I’ve tried, I’ve seen similarly high brightness static images in Safari. If you can’t do it with canvas, I’m betting you can do it with a Blob object/blob: URL or even just a plain data: URL. You’ll also need to set the appropriate color space, otherwise it’ll default to sRGB. You very well may also need to use some non-web APIs (pick your binary interface of choice), if canvas clamps to 8-bit (which I’m too lazy to look up on mobile at this particular moment, but I’d be surprised if it doesn’t).
- deergomoo 5y agoFurther info: https://prolost.com/blog/edr https://prolost.com/blog/edr What’s nuts is that this also works on displays without the ability to control luminosity on individual parts of the screen. The link you posted works on my 2020 11” iPad Pro, which has an LCD with no local dimming. However, it slowly ramps up over a second or two, whereas my OLED iPhone (which can of course set luminosity per pixel) enters retina-searing mode immediately.
- dcdc123 5y agoMy iPhone X ramps up as well.
- imwillofficial 5y agoThis was serious cool to see
- jiggawatts 5y agoEven on 100% brightness, an iPhone Pro 13 shows the "White" text significantly brighter than the background white. Some other interesting observations: - If I zoom in, the over-100%-bright text fades until it blends in with the background. This is expected (OLEDs have higher peak brightness for small areas), but what isn't expected is that it seems to do it in discontinuous steps. - If I go outside into full sunlight, the contrast between the page and text is lower. This is again an iPhone feature in action where "maximum brightness" is actually further boosted in bright conditions. - The text takes a few seconds to reach maximum brightness. I expected it to start at full brightness and fade, but it seems to do the opposite... I can understand why the notion programmers have that "color" is an RGB triple of 8-bit integers from 0 to 255 is so attractive. It's a simple mental model with no complexity. But to get the most out of modern displays, we have to abandon such childishly simple models. Each color channel will need to be 10 bit minimum, 16 if using linear light. Peak brightness becomes this complex many-faceted thing with per channel maximums, all-channel maximums, and variations based on both time and area!
- novok 5y agoThe reason why it acts this way is because of oled heat, power and burn in limits. On a microled display such limits wouldn’t occur nearly as much. HDR color in programming will mostly just be a bigger color value. All the other stuff is display by display model specific. We have such variation in sdr displays too, and most programmers never really think about the color profile of the display either.
- riwsky 5y agoIsn’t it fading because safari knows the HDR content in the corner is no longer on the screen?
- grishka 5y ago> Even on 100% brightness, an iPhone Pro 13 shows the "White" text significantly brighter than the background white. Same with the new MBP. The text does fade in over a second or two, and while that happens, I can notice the entire screen flicker ever so slightly. There's clearly some very impressively calibrated interplay between the LCD panel and the backlight going on. > I can understand why the notion programmers have that "color" is an RGB triple of 8-bit integers from 0 to 255 is so attractive. Most of the time when dealing with color, it's colors of UI elements. And those are assumed to be sRGB anyway.
- ddlutz 5y agoFor anybody like me not 'getting it', the for me at least on my m1 pro macbook pro needed to use this in Safari, chrome unfortunately wasn't showing the white text.
- watermelon0 5y agoSame with Edge/Brave, however they all support HDR videos on Youtube, so I'm not sure what's the reason. Additionally, the site claims it works (worked?) on 2020 MBA M1.
- perryizgr8 5y agoThere seems to be a bug specific to safari, that's why it doesn't "work" on anything else.
- czhiddy 5y agoBy that logic, WebUSB is a bug specific to Blink-based browsers, since it doesn't work on anything else?
- perryizgr8 5y agoI don't understand. WebUSB seems to be a feature/standard.
- grishka 5y agoWebUSB is yet another attempt at turning a hypertext viewer into an operating system. Documents were never meant to be Turing-complete.
- easrng 5y agoHTML is far from the first document format that's turing complete. See Postscript, PowerPoint (No macros needed), Excel (No macros needed), PDF (if you count the embedded JS), Word (If you use macros), etc.
- saagarjha 5y agoA couple things: the Objective-C methods you listed are often accessible via the runtime APIs unless they are marked as being direct calls. And kSLSBrightnessRequestEDRHeadroom is unlikely to be a function; from its name it is probably a constant of some kind.
- alin23 5y agoOh right, I knew the k prefix seemed familiar. It is a constant. Can you elaborate more on the Objective-C methods? Are you talking about the “not exported” ones?
- shadowfacts 5y agoSince Obj-C methods are looked up at runtime not at link time, you should be able to just declare it yourself and then call it normally.
- exsf0859 5y agoIt's easy to write an app that displays arbitrary graphics at 1600 nits on the MacBook Pro. You just have to use the Metal API, an "extended" color space, and a Float colorPixelFormat. I'm not sure that this blog post author is trying to accomplish, possibly they are trying to use some other API besides Metal?
- krackers 5y agoI believe the author wanted the entire screen framebuffer to be displayed at 1600 nits. I.e. effectively cranking the brightness up to 11.
- imwillofficial 5y agoI see they finally invented the at home xray
- Dylan16807 5y agoOr, like, 800.
- kevingadd 5y agoEven if they don't want to use Metal, there's stuff like MoltenVK that you can probably use to access the same functionality
- roughly 5y agoThe author is the author of lunar - https://lunar.fyi/ https://lunar.fyi/ - an app for controlling screen brightness on external (and internal) screens on the Mac. He is trying to force the system to brighten the entire screen to the levels it will brighten light spots in an HDR video.
- alin23 5y agoI’m not trying to draw HDR content. I want to increase to overall UI brightness (basically, make the brightness of where backlight LEDs go past the software defined limit) I’m testing Apple’s claim of 1000 nits sustained brightness which led many people to believe that they can finally use their laptop in direct sunlight without squinting at the screen. I’m aware of thermal limitations and that even sustained might not mean “whole screen at 1000 nits for 8 hours”. But it would be nice to be able to use 1 hour of my work time to work in the park outside my apartment with a bright enough screen for that time. The system has thermal capping implemented from what I saw in the CoreBrightness framework, so it should be safe as long as the system can detect that LEDs are starting to overheat and lower the brightness automatically.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nomilk 5y agoAbsolutely love that someone's trying to do this. I was scouting around for a way too [1] I take 5 minutes to ride from home/office to a table in a nearby park to work from there for 1-2 hours. It's so healthy and invigorating, and the change of scenery can inspire creativity. But it's hard to justify when nuances on the screen become imperceptible under bright sun light. 1-200 more nits would change that. And the 2021 16" MBPs are technically capable of up to 1600 nits! [1] https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/429798 https://apple.stackexchange.com/q/429798
- seltzered_ 5y agoAnother approach I finally found outside of seeking a higher brightness screen or eink is having the screen on a stand and closer to your face - particularly with a tablet pc. Between this and some tree cover it's been manageable to have longer outdoor sessions.
- mensetmanusman 5y agoThis is hilarious, I imagine a future where you have to pay extra on Netflix to view special content above 500 nits. Apple building in this framework creates brand new business opportunities to take money from customers.
- ______-_-______ 5y agoPay the Apple 30% tax to get 30% brighter pixels
- bastawhiz 5y agoTesla asks you to pay $200 to enable to heated seats that are already installed in the back of your car
- lostlogin 5y agoKeurig won’t make your drink because you didn’t buy their capsules. https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/r7n8cd/keurig_refuses_to_brew_my_tea_because_they_didnt/ https://www.reddit.com/r/assholedesign/comments/r7n8cd/keuri...
- crazysim 5y agoI thought the future is now? You have to be on the highest plan for resolution right? Do they have SD HDR?
- phh 5y agoDolby already implemented that with Dolby Vision IQ Dolby Vision requires the whole chain to perfectly respect what the content says, both in color and brightness, so if you have a bright film, it'll blind you in the dark. But they now license (I assume for an additional fee) adaptive brightness for Dolby Vision!
- harha 5y agoDoes anyone know how to read or measure the brightness of a screen? I wasn’t able to get the reading the author has from Console.app
- alin23 5y agoioreg usually reports the nits value in some property. On an M1 you can run the following: ioreg -r -c AppleCLCD2 | grep -i nits
- harha 5y agoat least on the iMac it doesn't work, tried: ioreg -l -f | grep nits which should list properties of all objects, and the display I could find: ioreg -r -c AppleBacklightDisplay
- d000001 5y agoThe iOS app Radiance+ [1] allows you to take an existing photo and generate an extended dynamic range image that has this effect. The results are compelling where the whites are far brighter than the system white. You need iPhone 12 or better to support. [1] https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/radiance/id1573366225 https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/radiance/id1573366225
- nottorp 5y agoIsn't like ... 200 nits ... a healthy upper limit for looking at a screen all day?
- alin23 5y agoIsn’t this highly dependent on the ambient light around you?
- nottorp 5y agoHe's using an Apple laptop. If he's trying to work outside... i'd like to know how long till his keyboard breaks from the tiniest speck of dust. Thus, I'm assuming indoors.
- alin23 5y agoThe butterfly keyboard mechanism responsible for breaking on dust particles is gone on newer laptops. The current MacBook keyboards are quite nice, they have the same mechanism as the external Magic Keyboard sold by Apple, and they seem quite resilient. I had no stuck key in the last 2 years.
- nottorp 5y agoYou use it outdoors? I'm typing this on one of the emoji keyboard laptops and it works so "well" that I'm not in a rush to give Apple more money for a portable... Note that I bought the 2018 or 2019 model with extra isolation under the keys. That didn't help at all.
- alin23 5y agoYes, since the beginning of 2020 I’ve used the MacBook Pro in parks and botanical gardens where there are a lot of particles flying around (after an hour I usually had to wipe the screen to be able to see something). The keyboard worked perfectly fine. I haven’t had a chance to test the 2019 Intel MacBook too much, but the M1 2020 was heavily used outdoors. I believe the M1 2020 model was the first one to get the Magic Keyboard mechanism: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824 https://support.apple.com/kb/SP824
- can16358p 5y agoIs there a technical reason for not enabling going beyond 500 nits when a user just ramps screen brightness? I'm no expert but if that can peak at 1600 nits for a while, it should have been able to sustain 800-1000ish for quite a long time?
- alin23 5y agoI think that long time might not be higher than an hour or two given how much heat the LEDs need to dissipate. A lot of non-technical users might get used to that brightness and then start complaining about their display dimming by itself randomly.
- jeroenhd 5y agoApple claims on its website to support 1,000 nits sustained brightness and 1,600 nits peak brightness. If in reality they can only sustain 500 nits brightness, that's probably a disappointment to people who spent extra on the newer, fancier display in the hopes of working on the laptop outside. If they can't sustain their sustained brightness, that might even be false advertising.
- dilap 5y agoYeah, I'm people; got a 14" MBP expecting to be able to ramp up the brightness, and was surprised to find it caps out at exactly the same brightness as my previous 16" Intel. I think their marketing claims here are extremely deceptive. Apple should be above engaging in such shenanigans! (Nevertheless, still super happy w/ the computer as a whole; it's an amazing machine.)
- can16358p 5y agoThen why is Apple advertising it as 1000nits sustained? If it can sustain 1000 nits for HDR content, it can for SDR too. The display isn't going to say "hey it's SDR let me piss them off" and suddenly start dissipating more heat at 1000 nits at SDR compared to HDR after all.
- therealmarv 5y agoIdea: create a small web browser or movie player app which plays a 1x1 nearly invisible HDR video in some corner and get the nits limit higher. I had sometimes problems with color management on mac on fullscreen videos and to prevent that I put a small window from Helium or Pennywise (always on top browsers) into some corner to fix it.
- alin23 5y agoUnfortunately that doesn’t work. The pixels of the SDR content will still be capped at 500 nits as you can see in the article: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/over-500nits-failed/#sdr-cap-in-normal-lighting https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/over-500nits-failed/#sdr-cap-i...
- fulafel 5y agoAll the commentary seems to be accepting framing of the situation as a "over max brightness" band you can access when they're just dimming normal content. Brings to mind the business with doubling pixel sizes with the 4K displays and requiring tricks from apps and web content to access the native resolution.
- alin23 5y agoThey’re not dimming the SDR content. It is an optical illusion. The HDR white is actually a lot brighter than the SDR white (which means the LEDs behind those pixels are allowed to go to full brightness). You can see that effect if you watch this video in Safari on a 2021 MacBook Pro: https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/hdr-test-pattern.webm https://files.alinpanaitiu.com/hdr-test-pattern.webm Here's an article where the nits value is measured using a calibration device: https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-MacBook-Pro-14-only-manages-500-nits-with-SDR-contents.575327.0.html https://www.notebookcheck.net/The-new-MacBook-Pro-14-only-ma... The measurement shows that SDR content goes up to 500 nits (which was the peak value of previous MacBook displays as well) while HDR content goes up to 1607 nits.
- fulafel 5y agoIf we have a monitor that has a brightness of 1600 nits, and whites of some content ("sdr") shows up much dimmer, the pixels the monitor is asked to display by the systmes are dimmed relative to max brightness - no?
- alin23 5y agoYes, that’s another way of putting it. But people usually look at this, relative to previous displays, not relative to peak brightness (since the peak brightness is not achievable for prolonged periods of time because of overheating)
- fulafel 5y agoOverheating sounds interesting! So what happens if you display a max brightness hdr image on the screen for a long time, does the monitor shut off? Edit: apparently at least on some laptops your screen may automatically adjust brightness downwards if you are in a hot climate and the cooling system fails to keep up: https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/04/macbook-pro-limited-brightness-pro-display-xdr/ https://9to5mac.com/2022/02/04/macbook-pro-limited-brightnes...
- Syzygies 5y agoA "nit" is also an alternate term for a "nat", the natural logarithm counterpart to a Shannon information "bit". This headline really threw me, trying to guess at what level of organization there was an information bandwidth issue with the MacBook Pro that would be measured as "500 nits".