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Display brighter-than-white color on Apple devices
- orangepanda 3y agoWhat privileges a superwhite QR code has versus a regular white?
- da768 3y agoWorks better in plain sunlight and with barcode scanners I assume. Pretty much any apps showing a barcode sets your phone on full brightness.
- londons_explore 3y agoAny QR reader in 2023 that cannot read a black and white QR code on a regular brightness phone screen should probably be considered faulty...
- esrauch 3y agoHaven't flown in a few years but I flew a ton 2017-2020 and airlines could never scan the barcode on an eTicket if I forgot to turn the brightness up all the way. I'm guessing it is more because of glare than contrast though if that makes you feel any better.
- londons_explore 3y agoAirline barcodes aren't QR codes. They are Aztec codes or PDF417 codes, and software for reading them is generally less robust and less smart because less investment has gone into clever ways to align the codes quickly. The codes themselves also have less good alignment markers, especially for dealing with lens distortion.
- chakintosh 3y agoExactly. QR code scanning abilities of new smartphones has gotten so incredibly quick at scanning the code. I barely point my iPhone 14 Pro's camera at the code and it already scans and displays the information. Even with the motion blur on the camera as I'm pointing the phone at the code. I think the focus should be more on the ability to interpret damaged codes via ML capabilities as most QR codes are outdoors.
- jwestbury 3y agoScanning an on-screen QR code is usually done with barcode scanners, not with phones. Typically, barcode scanners are doing the decoding on-device, and passing out keyboard data (their drivers usually identify them as USB HID). Unfortunately, most scanners don't have loads of onboard processing power, though ability to deal with damaged linear barcodes has been quite good for a long time. Damaged 2D barcodes are harder to deal with, and while ML may be able to solve that, it would require a paradigm shift in how barcode scanners operate -- and essentially bifurcate the market, as some scanners would simply no longer be compatible with embedded systems, and would require specialised software to function (which isn't really ideal; most users of barcode scanners want them to be plug-and-play). (My first post-university job was doing tech support for a company which sold point-of-sale equipment. I'd say about 50% of my job was helping people with barcode scanners.)
- account42 3y agoPhones typically have glossy screens which can be a real problem if there are light sources in the sourrundings that can be reflected - including the scanner's own lights which, yes, should be turned off when scanning a phone barcode but this is not always the case in practice. Upping the brightness of the phone display itself mitigates this.
- londons_explore 3y agoPhone screens are awfully flat though - which means glare from a light is typically a small area. QR codes are robust to small areas being missing. In fact, a typical QR code is readable with about 20% of the code missing.
- michaelt 3y agoNot really - a large thing being reflected means a large area of glare. A lot of scanning takes place out of doors - think of someone scanning e-tickets at a music festival or sports event.
- sdflhasjd 3y agoI've been doing some work in this space (eticketing) and it's not as easy as you think. OK, 95% of the time it works, but that's not good enough and when you move into the "real world" - cracked screens, smudges, glare, dirty sensors it gets worse. The failure cases waste a huge amount of time.
- hnbad 3y agoEvery time I'm queuing somewhere that requires scanning QR codes or digital barcodes, I see some people going through the back-and-forth of scans not working and the person fiddling with their brightness settings or fighting auto-brightness. I'd say there's a legitimate use case for this right there.
- yootyootr 3y agoIt makes regular white look dim/dull so adverts programmed to take advantage of the superwhite will attract more attention.
- Reason077 3y agoA brighter display with higher contrast is more likely to work reliably with certain barcode scanners. For example, I sometimes struggle to get my Tesco Clubcard QR code (edit: actually an Aztec code) to scan on their old (red laser) self-checkout machines with my iPhone, but on my Apple Watch it displays brighter and seems to work more reliably.
- unsupp0rted 3y agoI'm listening to Spotify on a stock M1 MacBook Pro 16", and when I opened this Github demo the speakers started crackling, until I closed the tab.
- ornornor 3y ago> please don’t abuse this I’m preparing popcorn.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y ago(marquee) popcorn (\marquee)
- Snoozus 3y agoThe reason you can only do this with video is to avoid burn in?
- progbits 3y agoNo standardized support in HTML/CSS. Video containers can store the color profile information.
- cubefox 3y agoI assume CSS colors are defined for an sRGB color space and the iPhone displays are calibrated, so they show a smaller color range than they could. OLED is able to go well beyond sRGB.
- zokier 3y agoCSS color() can do Display-P3 and Rec2020
- adrian_b 3y agoNot only OLED, but most good LCD monitors support the Display P3 color space (derived from DCI P3), with 30 bit per pixel, which is much larger than sRGB. While Safari has been supporting Display P3 for several years, all major browsers support since the beginning of the year CSS Color Module Level 4, which includes support for Display P3 (for all the other even larger supported color spaces there are no monitors or TV sets of reasonable price that can display them). Most monitors come from the factory configured to display 24-bit sRGB colors, so the user must change the default settings to be able to display 30-bit Display P3 colors. However the color space only affects the maximum saturation of the colors, not the maximum brightness of the colors, which is determined by the brightness setting of the monitor. For a white brighter than the brightest normal white, it is not enough to have a monitor with a wide color gamut, it must also be HDR capable and the software must support HDR too.
- cubefox 3y agoI don't quite get the saturation/brightness difference here. Isn't $fff "whiter" than $eee? Where whiter means brighter? Then why couldn't the whitest color be even whiter, and hence brighter, in a larger color space? (I assume the answer is that a larger color space contains colors that are "redder" or "yellower", but not "whiter", for some reason.)
- ash 3y agoDuplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384625 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384625
- tda 3y agodoesn't work with firefox on my M1 MBP, but it does in safari.
- londons_explore 3y agoHow many hours can I display super-white brightness before burnin starts to happen? If this is just designed for bright brief 'glints' of light in videos, I can imagine the screen itself might be being substantially overdriven, and there might well be damage if you did this for hours on end (or even maybe minutes, especially on a hot day). OLED isn't known for longevity when displaying bright colors...
- fifafu 3y agopeople have been using Vivid or BetterDisplay for months on macOS to ramp up the brightness (they are awesome for working outdoors) - so far I don't think any damages have been reported. The Apple displays automatically seem to dim when they overheat
- londons_explore 3y agoAll of Apples laptop range is still LCD right, not OLED?
- jimnotgym 3y agoNo some newer ones are mini LED
- eyesee 3y agoMacBooks don’t ship with OLED displays, only micro LED (“XDR”) displays which shouldn’t be susceptible. iPhones however do have OLED displays.
- londons_explore 3y ago> The 12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR display has an IPS LCD panel supporting a resolution of 2732x2048 pixels for a total of 5.6 million pixels with 264 pixels per inch. [1] "Liquid Retina XDR" is just a high end LCD. Micro LED isn't yet on anything they sell. All apple devices phone-size and smaller currently use OLED, and everything larger uses IPS LCD. [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212527 https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212527
- user_7832 3y agoIf anyone’s curious how this physically (appears to) work - it seems it boosts the backlight and applies a dark overlay on the rest of the page. If the brightness on my iPad Air 4 is max, the white stays the same. If it’s lower then it’s “super white”.
- fifafu 3y agoIt does not apply any dark overlay, at least not on HDR screens, it just looks like it does due to the big difference in brightness. I would assume the iPad Air 4 doesn't have a HDR screen, but maybe I'm wrong. On HDR capable screens you should still see a huge difference even on maximum brightness.
- treecle 3y agoApple does some trickery to display HDR on non HDR Apple displays. Look up EDR.
- AlanYx 3y agoOn some post-2017 non-HDR Apple displays, the OS actually dynamically adjusts the screen's gamma curve to simulate this effect. On machines that support this, if you hold Option down while opening the Display control panel, there's an additional option that appears to enable/disable this.
- krona 3y agoOn my 2023 M2 MBP (XDR display) there is still a large difference between the white on the page at max brightness and the video whiteness. In fact the video gets even brighter at max brightness.
- user_7832 3y agoCould you try manually increasing the brightness to maximum if that's possible? (Though I suspect with local dimming zones and the language on the Apple website the whole display can't be kept at "max" brightness, as a local zone can still be brighter.)
- donatj 3y agoI’ve never understood why HDR is implemented in the strange way it is, outside the normal color spectrum. Really seems like #fff should just be the whitest white the display can physically support.
- marginalia_nu 3y agoRGB isn't an appropriate model for brightness is why.
- donatj 3y agoWhy is that? Isn’t brightness just an R G and B value by physical definition?
- brookst 3y agoOur eyes are non-linear across the spectrum. #A0004F is much darker than #00FF00. Thats why we have the CIE colorspace and HSB/HSL/etc. All of those use a nonlinear geometry that better maps to the way we perceive colors.
- donatj 3y agoScaling the colors for our eyes seems like something for some sort of psychometrics library and we'd be better served having direct access the just the r g and b brights control of the individual pixels
- tedunangst 3y agoWhy are we better served by wasting bits?
- Jasper_ 3y agoThat would lead to inconsistent brightness across devices -- white on a 2000 nits HDR TV is extremely bright, you likely don't want that as a paper white background. Standardizing on some good enough value of nits (usually between 80 and 200) for "SDR" peak white tends to work better.
- Tepix 3y agoNote it will not show superbright colors if you are in low power mode on the iPhone.
- layer8 3y agoAlso not with Smart Invert Colors turned on (where it’s still white, but remains at normal brightness).
- fifafu 3y agoThis has been known for quite a while and can be used for arbitrary HTML elements with some CSS hacks. I'm suprised no "super bright" advertisements have shown up so far. https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ (Safari only) On macOS you can use apps like BetterDisplay, Vivid or BetterTouchTool to enable that HDR mode for the whole display, which makes it significantly easier to work outside. On iOS there is "Vivid Browser" - a browser that enables the HDR mode for the whole screen.
- jannes 3y agoI think many people learned this today. "Known to you" might not be the same as "known to everybody else" :)
- fifafu 3y agoYep! It's just me wondering why the advertising industry hasn't picked up on this, given that they are usually fast to exploit any possible browser feature/quirk to push their advertisements.
- jannes 3y agoProbably Safari users aren't their top priority right now (after all the anti-tracking features that Apple added).
- fifafu 3y agoI'd assume iOS is still one the most important markets for advertisers
- 411111111111111 3y agoThat'd heavily depend on the target audience, safari's market share is tiny if it's global. It should be pretty high if the target audience is US only and mainly the higher income brackets, however.
- cs02rm0 3y agoIt displays as normal on my M1 MBP and then gradually ramps up over a second or two to the superbright white. Seems better suited to a static white area than a few video frames? At least on this device, I guess others might be more responsive to it?
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoThat's probably your OS gradually adjusting instead of just jumping to the desired brightness as encoded in the video.
- madethemcry 3y agoThat's interesting. Every normal white feels pale and boring after seeing that white. I'm not writing this as a joke, everything that is supposed to be white looks like a greyish, washed out white right now.
- JLCarveth 3y agoAt first I thought the page was playing a trick by applying a tint to the page.
- grishka 3y agoBut eventually your vision readjusts to the old levels and normal whites feel normal again.
- sweetjuly 3y agobut some part of you will always be chasing that high again, always needing that hit, that rush
- feintruled 3y agoYes! I thought the Safari example above had just dimmed the rest of the screen as a trick, but then I closed the window and it was all still grey and dull. I have been spoiled now I have glimpsed 'true white'.
- Cthulhu_ 3y agoMost colours are relative to their surroundings anyway; there's a few cool optical illusions that illustrate that like https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/27/12-fascinating-optical-illusions-show-how-color-can-trick-the-eye/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/27/12-fa...
- xp84 3y agoSame thing happens watching something projected on a screen (in a room of non-zero brightness). Imagine a zebra or a checkerboard projected on a white screen. When you're looking at the projected image, you really see "black and white" but only when you consciously reconsider and look at the margins of the screen outside the image, you realize the zebra or checkerboard's "black" parts are actually full white (possibly even a touch brighter due to LCD) and the white parts are just ultra bright white. It always amazes me that we're naturally able to perceive any (reasonable) relative gradient of dark to bright as though it's true black-to-white.
- kurishutofu 3y agoI tried experimenting with something similar using three.js a while ago [0] when I saw the other post [1]. The trick was hiding the HDR video in the page, allowing other elements to surpass a brightness level of 1. I have a post-processing shader that divides all brightness values by 2, along with CSS that applies filter: brightness(2). Finally a shader material on one of the spheres multiplies its fragment output by a value above one. [0] https://r3f-hdr.netlify.app https://r3f-hdr.netlify.app [1] https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/
- mindbyte 3y agoA simple website blowing my mind is very rare. And now every other white seems so pale & washed out.
- joshstrange 3y agoI'm on an iPhone 14 Pro Max in Safari without power saving turned on but those 2 QR codes look identical to me. I tried turning off dark mode but they still look the same. What am I doing wrong here?
- leidenfrost 3y agoYou need to have HDR enabled on your device
- ash 3y agoHow do you enable HDR on iPhone for viewing?
- aeyes 3y agoEnable HDR, disable power saving and don't have screen brightness on max.
- Zamicol 3y agoBrowser support for "HDR" features is already in CSS. Using a video over idiomatic CSS is a hack. https://developer.chrome.com/articles/high-definition-css-color-guide/ https://developer.chrome.com/articles/high-definition-css-co...
- ash 3y agoHow can it be used? What browsers and what operating systems support it?
- hbn 3y agoApple did a clever thing with HDR content where it can appear amongst other non-HDR content, and only the part of the screen displaying the HDR content is in HDR. But in practice it looks really bad and I hate every time I'm scrolling Instagram and an HDR video appears in my feed. It blows my eyes out and then the rest of my screen looks gray and muted for a few seconds until I get the HDR content off my screen.
- flutas 3y agoYup, exactly the same impression for me. To me it doesn't make HDR content look better, but it makes the non HDR content around it just look worse.
- hbn 3y agoHonestly I think it kind of makes both look bad. Everything else looks muted, but also the HDR content itself looks cartoonishly over-saturated because your eyes are not in the context of seeing colors like that on your screen as it is.
- whalesalad 3y agoAlways wondered wtf was going on here and now it makes sense.
- kitsunesoba 3y agoMy opinion of this way of handling HDR is kinda mixed when it comes to phones, but on computers and tablets I prefer it to the way that e.g. Windows handles HDR, where non-HDR parts of the screen look weirdly dim, which makes you want to only turn HDR on when running a game that supports it or something like that.
- LelouBil 3y agoI have this only when turning on HDR in windows, but not in my screen. When both are on, it's good.
- mrtksn 3y ago
- xwdv 3y agoIs there an opposite to this such as “superblack”?
- kristofferR 3y agoNo, pixels can't be more off than completely off. That's why OLEDs have "perfect blacks", it's not an exaggeration, it's physically impossible to create better blacks.
- d_tr 3y agoUnless we want to be pedantic and take the ambient light reflected off the screen into account. Old CRT monitors, for example, reflected a lot of ambient light and looked grey when turned off in a lit room. And even when operating in a dark room there would be some diffusion from the lit areas of the screen, which is why they did not actually have "perfect blacks" like many believe. If you had a very dark scene you would have less internal diffusion too though so it would indeed look very good. Something similar could be happening in OLEDs, but yeah IMO OLEDs have perfect blacks for all intents and purposes.
- shove 3y agoNo one made the Spinal Tap joke? I’m disappointed in all of you. (Again)
- killjoywashere 3y agoUh, that just made my screens darker, so kindly never do that again. That's worse than a blink tag. [edit] not sure why the downvotes. I have an XDR screen and it's quite distracting when my entire screen goes dark for some local video to get bright.
- albertzeyer 3y agoI was wondering whether such HDR videos are also on YouTube. Yes, same super white video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n__QY3e55Lc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n__QY3e55Lc Some other random HDR video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72_rYwzLhjk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72_rYwzLhjk
- oniony 3y agoPersil are going to have a field day with this.
- Ralfp 3y agoSo this is the trick that Facebook was using to make videos stand out more in the feed? I've noticed they are darkening rest of the page a little, but didn't know this also bumps backlighting brightness.
- knolan 3y agoThis will happen with any video recorded in HDR, on iPhone 12 and later for example. You see it all the time on Reddit, YouTube etc. It probably isn’t anything Facebook is doing.
- sequoia 3y agoIs the "normal white" toned down to reduce eye-strain?
- foolrush 3y ago“Brighter-than-white”… Gilchrist enters the chat. http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/gilchrist%20(1999)%20an%20anchoring%20theory%20of%20lightness%20perception.pdf http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/gilchrist%20(1999)%20an%...
- devit 3y agoThere probably should be a toggle or a separate brightness control (i.e. "maximum brightness" and "default brightness") if something like that is exposed to the web. Letting content be arbitrarily much brighter than what the user expects seems a terrible design, easily exploitable by advertisers and all sorts of attention thieves.
- ko27 3y ago> Unfortunately, this color cannot be represented with CSS colors (rgb(999,999,999) doesn’t work) I think this is wrong. Browsers already support HDR with other color space like this one https://oklch.com/ https://oklch.com/
- dkasper 3y agoThis hurts my eyeballs.
- baxtr 3y agoSame for me. Can't look at it for long
- vardump 3y agoApparently a tab with that hack consumes a ton of energy, even when hidden. Weird. Google Chrome, MBP M2 16".
- wolverine876 3y agoThe number of colors defined by software will not represent exactly all the colors a system can display; the software colors are arbitrarily defined and at discrete levels. I expect that any system can physically output colors in addition to the software definitions, including in-between colors and especially, assuming the engineers left margin for error, colors at the extremes of brightness and hue could be generated.
- neoyagami 3y agoit makes my second screen to panic and glitch some windows when this is present
- neoyagami 3y agothis makes my second screen to panic and glitch some windows when this is present
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- msla 3y agoWhy don't they just make #FFFFFF brighter?
- epgui 3y agoAm I the only person wondering whether at some point screen brightness becomes a health concern? Looking at this for more than a second almost hurts, and now it's as if I've stared into a flashlight and it takes minutes for my eyes to get back to normal. (not an eye specialist, but I do have a biomedical background and I don't think it's completely ridiculous to be somewhat concerned...)
- mkmk 3y agoI’ve wondered the same on the constant IR flashes from FaceID. It doesn’t seem like it should be a problem compared to going outside in the sun, but it is a bit unsettling to see how bright and frequent the flashes are (a Nest camera pointed at a dark room shows them clearly).
- epgui 3y agoIt’s not necessarily the perceived brightness that I am worried about. Illuminated surroundings outdoors on a sunny day are obviously perceived to be brighter than any screen… But here we have a flickering light source that is microscopically very heterogeneous. LED emission spectra (even for very expensive ones) are extremely non-uniform and “peaky” at narrow bands of wavelengths. I’m not as worried about it as I am of lasers, but it’s a similar idea, maybe (very loosely speaking).
- geuis 3y agoI have an LG 4k HDR display (that really isn't very good in the HDR department), and this works on the display too. I have to set the display to HDR mode, which then displays all colors really weird and mute, but the super bright trick does indeed work.
- PeterStuer 3y agoFor those confused by the title: it's not "brighter than white", it's the same white but with the HDR pushing more nits.
- pindab0ter 3y agoI don't see how that's a useful clarification. It's very clearly brighter than 100% SDR white.
- PeterStuer 3y agoBut it is still white. It didn't change in hue, tint or shade, just in value. So the "brighter than white" statement seems recursive and/or ambiguous.