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Comment by chongli | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone actually used a decent HDR display? I’m really skeptical of the technology. I really don’t want websites and videos to be able to display blindingly bright white and other pure colours on my screen. I like things to be readable and not painful to look at.

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I think my laptop has a decent HDR display? It's a MacBook Pro 14" with "Liquid Retina XDR" as they call it. I think HDR content looks more or less ... as intended.

I think it's terrible. The only time I even remember that HDR is a thing is when some embedded video in a web page gets much brighter than the rest of the screen and the rest of the screen looks dim as a result. It's never a "wow that sun looks amazing" style experience, it's always a "wow most of my screen just got really dark" style experience.

I think maybe HDR has a place in movies and TV shows and even maybe YouTube style videos (not that I've experienced that), but I think enabling HDR for small video embeds on a web page was a terrible decision.

If the rest of your screen actually dims, then your screen is not displaying things correctly.

If everything is dim in comparison because the HDR is so bright, is that happening only in especially bright scenes, or is that happening all the time?

The screen doesn't literally dim, but my experience is that the screen suddenly dims because this one part gets so much brighter than the pure SDR white it's surrounded by.

I'm not talking about this in the context of watching long videos or something, but when just browsing through stuff on sites like Reddit. I'll be clicking on the "expand image" button on a series of posts (using the old reddit design) and then suddenly one of them is a HDR video which makes the rest of the screen appear to dim until I close it. So we're not talking about "especially bright scenes". And I'm sure that if I fullscreened the video and the whole screen was covered by that single piece of HDR media, it would look alright.

My guess is that those videos are filmed on an iPhone in HDR mode.

Something has gone wrong in the calibration then. A normal scene shouldn't outshine normal windows. It's not a problem inherent to HDR.

What is the “correct” brightness to a video of the outside on a bright sunny day compared to the SDR GUI elements? What if the sun is in frame?

I won't pretend to be an expert, but I'd say a nice daylit scene should almost certainly not be brighter than SDR white.

If the sun is in frame, it should be very very bright, but it shouldn't be big enough to cause a problem.

If someone embeds a video of the sun then they're trolling you.

I mean I believe it's mostly just taking pictures or videos outside on their iPhones, which I believe will automatically capture in HDR if it's bright enough. I seriously doubt that people who upload some random picture they took outside to Reddit are intentionally trolling people who happen to use a device with an HDR screen.

> I seriously doubt that people who upload some random picture they took outside to Reddit are intentionally trolling people who happen to use a device with an HDR screen.

Right. Those aren't pictures of the sun.

I'm saying Apple's code is doing the wrong thing. Apple calibrated things wrong.

The sun can end up in frame in a video taken outside without it meaning that the person taking the video or uploading it to social media is "trolling" is my point.

I agree, but that has nothing to do with what I was saying. I specifically said that a sun at normal size wouldn't be a problem.

I mentioned full-frame sun as a totally separate scenario just to be thorough.

What you’ve described is absolutely not anywhere close to decent.

Right now it’s basically OLED in a dark room or don’t bother. Large TVs can get away with FALD, maybe.

It's because trying to view SDR content on an HDR display doesn't work. It will look like garbage. You have to turn HDR on and off depending on what content you view.

On Apple displays you don’t have to turn HDR on or off, it’s available all the time. SDR content is displayed as usual (exactly like everything looked 10 years ago) and HDR content can sit directly next to it and use whatever brightness headroom is available for extended dynamic range. It’s totally seamless and transparent, but the experience can make the user think that SDR content is getting darker as their eyes adjust to HDR.

That must be nice. Hopefully the rest of the world catches up to that.

Microsoft would need two years if they start yesterday. They won't.

Have you tried it on a Mac laptop? The OS will transparently boost the backlight brightness while shifting the white point of the non-HDR content down so that everything else on screen is completely unaffected.

It's very different from the experience I've had in Windows where if you enable the HDR setting everything looks shitty and washed out.

Yes. The HDR on a recent Macbook Pro is the real deal, and unmistakable when you see it. Same with modern OLED HDR TVs - they can get so bright it hurts.

I'm sure you mean LED TVs. OLED TVs are notorious for having a limited brightness. Only since 2022 are there some newer panels (called OLED.ext) that can do decent HDR.

> they can get so bright it hurts.

I regret that hn doesn't have HDR support so as to properly emphasize that <em><blink><pain>THIS IS NOT A FEATURE.</pain></blink></em>

It would have been a pretty nice feature though, if it could've been used to uniformly make SDR content brighter, to make the laptops more useful in sunlight and with sunglasses. Too bad that's not a feature (I'm guessing because it wear out the screen or something).

sunlight and with sunglasses

No thank you! If I’m outside enjoying the sun with sunglasses on then I have zero interest in using a laptop!

Sure, but there are also times when the desire to do something computery is greater than the desire to be outside. In those situations, it's a choice between being inside with a computer or being outside with a computer.

This is a “I'd like to turn up the brightness higher” feature, which is a different beast from “this advertisement would like to blind you; permit or deny?”

What OLEDS have decent brightness? OLEDS really struggle with that because of burn in. They can get temporarily bright, or bright in tiny zones, but in less than ideal conditions they crunch it right down.

LEDs have separate backlights, which is good for getting brighter but bad for contrast because they can't get as dark as OLEDs.

I think the reason you don't want to drive OLEDs as hard (so there's current limitation/ABL) is more about burn-out than burn-in.

If you're willing to sacrifice everything else (including money), yes, there are some nice HDR displays. Get something with HDR1000 standard or above. Get something with FALD and a LOT of zones. Make sure to check its color space coverage. Look at independent reviews. Be prepared to spend at least a couple grand.

But you'll have to turn HDR on and off depending on the content you're looking at. If you're looking at SDR content, it will look wrong if the display is in HDR mode. That sucks, and I hope some day is properly fixed.

OLED is also nice because it has perfect blacks (no local dimming needed), but it struggles with brightness, which is the other half of HDR. We still haven't figured out how to get both.

You don't have to turn HDR on and off if the OS does color management correctly. But of course only Apple platforms do this.

Apple doesn't do this on external monitors that aren't Apple displays BTW

My new iPhone has an "HDR" display, and it's really noticeably. For example, when taking photo's or video's of bright sunlight, the results "pop out" of the screen beautifully.

For productivity/reading, I want one of the new eInk screens. For gaming and video, the HDR OLED displays I have (LG and Dell) look incredible. Mixed content looks awful, just like mixes of high DPI UIs rendering low DPI websites.

Windows HDR support is a very mixed bag, just like their early support for high DPI, and I think that’s probably what leads some reviewers to dismiss it.

Windows struggles with HiDPI?

Any new or recent iPhone. When I first got my 14 Pro and displayed a photo with HDR I was blown away.

Any OLED display since 2015ish. I’ve got a 2017 LG C7 and it’s amazing to this day.

OLEDs have amazing blacks and great contrast, but they truly struggle to get bright. That still isn't solved, at least to my satisfaction. They can get bright briefly or in small areas of the screen, but tend to crunch the brightness a lot otherwise.

Yeah I do pull the curtains down to watch tv during the day. Don’t care too much since I rarely have time when the sun’s up. At night it’s absolutely stunning when the content's right.

Do you use an OLED iPhone?

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