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Comment by QuadrupleA | Hacker News Reader

Whatever. Why throw away 8% of your monitor's color gamut / dynamic range? Tip to the author, just turn up brightness on the monitor, or shine a desk light on it. Or get a monitor that bleeds some backlight or light from neighboring pixels. Unnaturalness fixed.

It's like saying digitized audio should never have complete silence in it because you rarely hear that in nature. Well, you rarely hear that in the room you're listening in either, or your own inner ear. Doesn't mean you have to add those sounds to the audio.

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Funnily most digital audio is never fully silent for a different reason. Noise is added for the least significant bit, because otherwise you can hear artifacts (deemed less attractive than noise) on silent parts that are close to the threshold of the bitdepth.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio

Dither works for images too, e.g. for cheap displays that only have 5 bits of color depth. It's hardly a problem for audio anymore which is now almost universally 24 bits (and arguably already wasn't an issue at 16..).

That's the noise floor, which should be below the threshold of human hearing unless you turn the volume up so high that the loudest signals would be uncomfortably/damagingly loud. 16-bit digital audio has a dynamic range of 96 dB. Even in an extremely well-insulated anechoic chamber where we (unrealistically) assume the ambient noise level is 0 db, you would theoretically hear extremely quiet white noise when playing back a plain old 16-bit CD, but that CD would still be able to blast out 96 dB which in nearly all imaginable circumstances would be louder than desired. In a more realistic scenario wearing well-isolating headphones in a very quiet normal room, the ambient noise level is probably more like 30 dB, and plain old 16-bit audio gives you plenty of dynamic range to perfect reproduce any conceivable digital audio signal for the vast majority of use cases. Certainly for things like music, I think it would be quite rare for a recording to have a dynamic range greater than, say, 60-70 dB.

> Tip to the author, just turn up brightness on the monitor, or shine a desk light on it. Or get a monitor that bleeds some backlight or light from neighboring pixels. Unnaturalness fixed.

While I agree with your sentiment, none of those are good solutions. Turning up the brightness influences the bright pixels much more than the black pixels (especially on decent displays). The desk light and bleeding backlight sound like a nightmare.

A much better idea would be to change your monitor's calibration (either in the OSD or in the OS settings), or to use a browser extension for color adjustments.

Monitors have contrast setting for this exact same purpose

Honestly, I just find this kind of weird. Unless you had a plasma display in 2012 (or a CRT?) you were using an LCD which have a realistic luminance ratio of ~200:1. Even the good FFS/IPS panels weren't better and the rest of the luminance range was taken up in the backlight... and unless you're in a blacked out basement you have reflection/scatter off the screen, which is already additive.

Most screen gammas are/were roughly square law (sRGB=2.2) above a small linear region below 16 (8bit) so green 0xFF is more than 256x brighter than 0x0F. This has changed with HDR and modern OLED and miniLED backlights that in a perfect environment (not your office) can achieve >1000:1 luminance ratios.

Even AMVA3 goes to 5000:1, and that's just a "normal" LCD panel, usually used edgelit from my experience with them.

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