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.
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!
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.
You mean the 16 EGA colors, right? /s
But more seriously, I was hugely disappointed to see Microsoft unwind their wide-gamut and HDR GUI capabilities that they introduced as far back as Vista while simultaneously Apple is making wide-gamut (Display P3) and HDR standard across all of their devices.
Someone at Microsoft was forward thinking, and now some idiot is undoing that good work just when displays are catching up to the software capabilities.
Sooner or later, Windows will cap framerates at 60 Hz to make sure 120 Hz monitors don't deliver any visible benefit either...
Now, of course you could circumvent this and add retina-burning-bright controls to your app. Your users would probably hate you for doing this.
And regarding wide gamut, I'm not sure what kinds of benefits this brings to UIs either. It does make photos and videos feel more lifelike, especially when combined with HDR. But I've seen an extension to CSS that allows specifying wide-gamut colors, and you can also use them in native UIs (I've managed to do that in my aforementioned experiments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30219169).
> wide-gamut and HDR GUI capabilities that they introduced as far back as Vista
Wow. That was quite the future proofing at the time when everyone was transitioning from CRTs, and LCDs of the time were noticeably crappier than CRTs.
The thing with Windows though is that it's really hard to get so many companies involved in the chain to agree on something like this. Apple has complete end-to-end control of both the hardware and the software/APIs which allows them to casually pull off this kind of stuff.
I think it's pretty weird trying to get more than maximum brightness from an Apple device. I think it would be far more useful to get a spectrum of usable levels of lower than minimum brightness. Apple's maximum brightnesses have always been close or the brightest devices available, but Apple devices minimum brightnesses have always been way too bright with no reason for it.
Additionally, the site claims it works (worked?) on 2020 MBA M1.
There seems to be a strange bug in Safari. If I change the tab from/to that page, the mouse cursor jumps to the bottom left corner of the screen.