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Comment by deviledeggs | Hacker News Reader

You likely have a "fake" HDR monitor. To cover most of the new gamut requires very bright backlight. Most cheap HDR PC monitors are only ~400nits, not nearly bright enough. They bare bones HDR 400 spec most meet is... Not very HDR.

For proper HDR you need 1000+ nits. Only Apple monitors and a few very expensive alternatives can do this. On other monitors the gamut is compressed and there's little difference between the colors at the edges.

You can test your monitor with this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlAsAuBtmps When it stops getting brighter, you've maxed out your display and it can't display the additional range.

For whatever reason TV tech is way better. Even cheap TVs tend to be brighter than the brightest PC monitors. If you have the space, a 40 inch TV sitting farther away will be far superior picture quality than a monitor

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This isn't quite right. You can have colors that are significantly out of gamut without being over-bright. Moreover, they might be using a traditional SDR screen which doesn't have any management of brightness at all. I can easily see the difference between the two images on my screen, which displays gamut differences out to about DCI-P3 despite only being a ~250 nit laptop screen.

> You can test your monitor with this https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NlAsAuBtmps

Actually I'm surprised to hear Youtube supports HDR video at all. I was under the impression that web support for HDR video was still rather lacking.

You are right, but many of these colors are physically dim and much harder to notice than the HDR "pop" of extremely bright colors.

YouTube has surprisingly great support for HDR and Wide Color Gamut. There's some utterly breathtaking 4k 60fps HDR WCG videos of Japanese cities I've been watching. The only downside is you practically need a supercomputer to decode them in realtime.

Many games are also getting "definitive edition" remasters with HDR and they look glorious.

Getting a quality HDR screen was a bigger upgrade for me than 1080p->4k . There's simply a shitload of colors that older monitors can't produce

> YouTube has surprisingly great support for HDR and Wide Color Gamut.

That's good to hear. Does it work on PC? I assume it's browser / OS limited if so.

> but many of these colors are physically dim and much harder to notice than the HDR "pop" of extremely bright colors

That's true, but on the other hand the typical diffuse white of an HDR film is only about 200 nits or so, well within reach of most SDR screens. Extremely bright things like small points of light and explosions do look way better in HDR, but there are also plenty of extra-sRGB colors that display perfectly fine on a 200 or 300 nit WCG SDR scren.

> Getting a quality HDR screen was a bigger upgrade for me than 1080p->4k

That's the exciting part of the new technology for sure. You've got to sit pretty close to a 4k screen to notice a difference. It's more useful for professionals who sit a couple feet away typing text into a 30 inch monitor all day.

I've only gotten it to work on Windows with Chrome so kinda lame, but at least it works well.

HDR is great for lifelike scenes. Games and movie. For browsing, kinda pointless.

People don't realize that sunny days are 5000+ nits and regular screens only hit 300. HDR makes things way more lifelike

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