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Arguably, even considering HDR a distinct thing is itself weird an inaccurate. All mediums have a range, and they've never all matched. Sometimes we've tried t

Arguably, even considering HDR a distinct thing is itself weird an inaccurate. All mediums have a range, and they've never all matched. Sometimes we've tried to calibrate things to match, but anyone watching SDR content for the past many years probably didn't do so on a color-calibrated and brightness calibrated screen - that wouldn't allow you to have a brightness slider. HDR on monitors is about communicating content brightness and monitor capabilities, but then you have the question of whether to clip the highlights or just map the range when the content is mastered for 4000 nits but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window.

dahart 1y ago
This! Yes I think you’re absolutely right. The term “HDR” is in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time when the most popular image formats and most common displays were not very sophisticated about colors. That said, there is one important part that is often lost. One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture absolute values in physical units, rather than relative brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and paper and TVs don’t have. Some new displays are getting absolute brightness features, but historically most media display relative color values.
- arghwhat 1y ago
  Absolute is also a funny size. From the perspective of human visual perception, an absolute brightness only matters if the entire viewing environment is also controlled to the same absolute values. Visual perception is highly contextual, and we are not only seeing the screen. It's not fun being unable to watch dark scenes during the day or evening in a living room, nor is vaporizing your retinas if the ambient environment went dark in the meantime. People want good viewing experience in the available environment that is logically similar to what the content intended, but that is not always the same as reproducing the exact same photons as the directors's mastering monitor sent towards their their eyeballs at the time of production.
  - dahart 1y ago
    Yep, absolutely! ;) This brings up a bunch of good points, and it tracks with what I was trying to say about conflating HDR processing with HDR display. But do keep in mind that even when you have absolute value images, that doesn’t imply anything about how you display them. You can experience large benefits with an HDR workflow, even when your output or display is low dynamic range. Assume that there will be some tone mapping process happening and that the way you map tones depends on the display medium and its capabilities, and on the context and environment of the display. Using the term “HDR” shouldn’t imply any mismatch or disconnect in the viewing environment. It only did so in the article because it wasn’t very careful about its terms and definitions.
  - tshaddox 1y ago
    Indeed. For a movie scene depicting the sky including the Sun, you probably wouldn't want your TV to achieve the same brightness as the Sun. You might want your TV to become significantly brighter than the rest of the scenes, to achieve an effect something like the Sun catching your eye. Of course, the same thing goes for audio in movies. You probably want a gunshot or explosion to sound loud and even be slightly shocking, but you probably don't want it to be as loud as a real gunshot or explosion would be from the depicted distance. The difference is that for 3+ decades the dynamic range of ubiquitous audio formats (like 16 bit PCM in audio CDs and DVDs) has provided far more dynamic range than is comfortably usable in normal listening environments. So we're very familiar with audio being mastered with a much smaller dynamic range than the medium supports.
tshaddox 1y ago
The term "HDR" arguably makes more sense for the effect achieved by tone mapping multiple exposures of the same subject onto a "normal" (e.g. SRGB) display. In this case, the "high" in "HDR" just means "from a source with higher dynamic range than the display."
- BlueTemplar 1y ago
  Remember "wide gamut" screens ? This is part of 'HDR' standards too... And it's quite annoying that 'HDR' (and which specific one ?) is treated as just being 'on' or 'off' even for power users...
theshackleford 1y ago
> but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window. Owning a display that can do 1300+ nits sustained across a 100% window has been the biggest display upgrade I think I have ever had. It's given me a tolerance for LCD, a technology I've hated since the death of CRTs and turned me away from OLED. There was a time I would have said i'd never own a non OLED display again. But a capable HDR display changed that logic in a big way. Too bad the motion resolution on it, especially compared to OLED is meh. Again, at one point, motion was the most important aspect to me (its why I still own CRTs) but this level of HDR...transformative for lack of a better word.
- lotrjohn 1y ago
  Hello fellow CRT owner. What is your use case? Retro video games? PC games? Movies?
  - theshackleford 1y ago
    Hello indeed! > What is your use case? Retro video games? PC games? Movies? All of the above! The majority of my interest largely stems from the fact that for whatever reason, I am INCREDIBLY sensitive to sample and hold motion blur. Whilst I tolerate it for modern gaming because I largely have no choice, CRT's mean I do not for my retro gaming, which I very much enjoy. (I was very poor growing up, so most of it for me is not even nostalgia, most of these games are new to me.) Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home with a 32" trinitron. I collect laserdisc/VHS and we have "retro video" nights where for whatever reason, we watch the worst possible quality copies of movies we could get in significantly higher definition. Much the same as videogames, I was not exposed to a lot of media growing up, my wife has also not seen many things because she was in Russia back then, so there is a ton for us to catch up on very slowly and it just makes for a fun little date night every now and again. Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold, or at least the broadcast monitors. I do not look forward to it haha.
    - lotrjohn 1y ago
      > Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home with a 32" trinitron. A 32” Trinny. Nice. I have the 32” JVC D-series which I consider my crown jewel. It’s for retro gaming and I have a laserdisc player but a very limited selection of movies. Analog baby. > Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold Mortgage = space. You won’t believe the nooks and crannies you can fit CRTs into. Attic. Shed. Crawl space. Space under basement stairs. Heck, even the neighbors house. I have no less than 14 CRTs ferreted away in the house. Wife thinks I have only 5. Get creative. Don’t worry about the elements, these puppies were built to survive nuclear blasts. Do I have a sickness? Probably. But analog!!!
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

dahart 1y ago

This! Yes I think you’re absolutely right. The term “HDR” is in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time when the most popular image formats and most common displays were not very sophisticated about colors. That said, there is one important part that is often lost. One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture absolute values in physical units, rather than relative brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and paper and TVs don’t have. Some new displays are getting absolute brightness features, but historically most media display relative color values.

arghwhat 1y ago
Absolute is also a funny size. From the perspective of human visual perception, an absolute brightness only matters if the entire viewing environment is also controlled to the same absolute values. Visual perception is highly contextual, and we are not only seeing the screen. It's not fun being unable to watch dark scenes during the day or evening in a living room, nor is vaporizing your retinas if the ambient environment went dark in the meantime. People want good viewing experience in the available environment that is logically similar to what the content intended, but that is not always the same as reproducing the exact same photons as the directors's mastering monitor sent towards their their eyeballs at the time of production.
- dahart 1y ago
  Yep, absolutely! ;) This brings up a bunch of good points, and it tracks with what I was trying to say about conflating HDR processing with HDR display. But do keep in mind that even when you have absolute value images, that doesn’t imply anything about how you display them. You can experience large benefits with an HDR workflow, even when your output or display is low dynamic range. Assume that there will be some tone mapping process happening and that the way you map tones depends on the display medium and its capabilities, and on the context and environment of the display. Using the term “HDR” shouldn’t imply any mismatch or disconnect in the viewing environment. It only did so in the article because it wasn’t very careful about its terms and definitions.
- tshaddox 1y ago
  Indeed. For a movie scene depicting the sky including the Sun, you probably wouldn't want your TV to achieve the same brightness as the Sun. You might want your TV to become significantly brighter than the rest of the scenes, to achieve an effect something like the Sun catching your eye. Of course, the same thing goes for audio in movies. You probably want a gunshot or explosion to sound loud and even be slightly shocking, but you probably don't want it to be as loud as a real gunshot or explosion would be from the depicted distance. The difference is that for 3+ decades the dynamic range of ubiquitous audio formats (like 16 bit PCM in audio CDs and DVDs) has provided far more dynamic range than is comfortably usable in normal listening environments. So we're very familiar with audio being mastered with a much smaller dynamic range than the medium supports.

tshaddox 1y ago

The term "HDR" arguably makes more sense for the effect achieved by tone mapping multiple exposures of the same subject onto a "normal" (e.g. SRGB) display. In this case, the "high" in "HDR" just means "from a source with higher dynamic range than the display."

BlueTemplar 1y ago
Remember "wide gamut" screens ? This is part of 'HDR' standards too... And it's quite annoying that 'HDR' (and which specific one ?) is treated as just being 'on' or 'off' even for power users...

theshackleford 1y ago

> but your monitor manages 1000-1500 and only in a small window. Owning a display that can do 1300+ nits sustained across a 100% window has been the biggest display upgrade I think I have ever had. It's given me a tolerance for LCD, a technology I've hated since the death of CRTs and turned me away from OLED. There was a time I would have said i'd never own a non OLED display again. But a capable HDR display changed that logic in a big way. Too bad the motion resolution on it, especially compared to OLED is meh. Again, at one point, motion was the most important aspect to me (its why I still own CRTs) but this level of HDR...transformative for lack of a better word.

lotrjohn 1y ago
Hello fellow CRT owner. What is your use case? Retro video games? PC games? Movies?
- theshackleford 1y ago
  Hello indeed! > What is your use case? Retro video games? PC games? Movies? All of the above! The majority of my interest largely stems from the fact that for whatever reason, I am INCREDIBLY sensitive to sample and hold motion blur. Whilst I tolerate it for modern gaming because I largely have no choice, CRT's mean I do not for my retro gaming, which I very much enjoy. (I was very poor growing up, so most of it for me is not even nostalgia, most of these games are new to me.) Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home with a 32" trinitron. I collect laserdisc/VHS and we have "retro video" nights where for whatever reason, we watch the worst possible quality copies of movies we could get in significantly higher definition. Much the same as videogames, I was not exposed to a lot of media growing up, my wife has also not seen many things because she was in Russia back then, so there is a ton for us to catch up on very slowly and it just makes for a fun little date night every now and again. Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold, or at least the broadcast monitors. I do not look forward to it haha.
  - lotrjohn 1y ago
    > Outside of that, we have a "retro" corner in our home with a 32" trinitron. A 32” Trinny. Nice. I have the 32” JVC D-series which I consider my crown jewel. It’s for retro gaming and I have a laserdisc player but a very limited selection of movies. Analog baby. > Sadly though, as I get ready to take on a mortgage, it's likely most of my CRT's will be sold Mortgage = space. You won’t believe the nooks and crannies you can fit CRTs into. Attic. Shed. Crawl space. Space under basement stairs. Heck, even the neighbors house. I have no less than 14 CRTs ferreted away in the house. Wife thinks I have only 5. Get creative. Don’t worry about the elements, these puppies were built to survive nuclear blasts. Do I have a sickness? Probably. But analog!!!

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]