Screens can get brighter now, but if your screen is too bright, that's entirely on you. Adjusting the brightness is trivial and you can even do it without using the buttons on the display (DDC/CI).
When I play games I get the vivid colors and contrast so all good.
It's just that monitors nowadays don't even default to SRGB profile.
Windows in hdr mode with hdr monitor(vesa certified) and windows in sdr with a monitor set to srgb mode should have an almost identical visual.
That's pretty much the issue here in a nutshell.
Not everyone is.
The default UI here on HN features your username in #828282 on a background of #F6F6EF [1], a contrast ratio of 3.54:1. The up and downvote arrows are #999999 on #F6F6EF [2], a ratio of 2.62:1. On a high-brightness screen, these less-intense contrasts look great. And this is far from the only place with 'nice calm greys' that are intentionally used by designers to reduce eye strain.
I run Visual Studio in dark mode, and Windows Explorer in dark mode, and Notepad++ in dark mode, and Omron Sysmac Studio in dark mode, and Autocad Electrical in dark mode, and Alibre CAD at the default (light gray) theme, and they look great. I'm in a nice, bright office, with (4) daylight 4' T8 LED bulbs directly overhead, and a whiteboard as the backdrop to my monitors, so it's not like I'm a recluse in a dark cave. The monitor brightness is not wrong.
At least, it's not wrong until I win-right or alt-tab over an Excel document or an old version of Studio 5000, where the color profile is stuck at black text on a white background. Then I'm instantly blinded. I can't set half the monitor (just the part over the Excel spreadsheet) to the right contrast and brightness to make Excel acceptable, because then I can't see better-designed apps.
And don't get me started on opening up a movie or game after work's done. "Set your brightness so the logo is barely visible." Yeah, no. "Game of Thrones is a cinematic show and therefore you have to watch it like you’re at a cinema: in a darkened room." Wagner and Snyder are watching their productions on studio-grade OLEDs. I won't put a show on the integrated screen of my old Thinkpad or Precision laptops, I know those displays are trash (and they're small, I only put stuff that's easy to see on them), but no brightness setting on my relatively nice IPS LCDs can comfortably handle the diversity of content they're used to display.
[1] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=828282&...
[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/?fcolor=999999&...
(I tried searching a few times, no luck..)
I like being able to see my phone in sunlight nowadays, but there have definitely been some tradeoffs.
>Gee, this stark white brightness is hurting my eyes, maybe I should turn down the brightness on my display...
>Nah, I'll just demand every single company completely overhaul the CSS and contrast of everything while begrudgingly suffering the eye-burning whiteness of companies that haven't yet overhauled their CSS
Like wtf?
Instead, it varies wildly, often for good reasons... and then switching windows exposes you to extreme shifts. E.g. switch between photograph editing and a giant white text document, nothing's gonna save you then - stuff that looks correct and good for photography is absurd when most of your screen is the same as the sun.
Calibration is one thing, perceived brightness of the whole screen with specific content is another. And it's heavily influenced by how many nits are available.
Taking it to the DPI example, having things built at a standardised DPI isn't about making everything appear the same physical size it's about making everything tuned against a consistent physical size for the exact same reason, default is always intended and your global adjustments are always consistently resulting in the source material being larger than intended or smaller than intended instead of "well, depends how uncalibrated the source was if it's still smaller or larger than intended".
You seem to be assuming the commenter you replied to didn't know that. As I understood it, all they were saying is that advice about calibration is useless for people who don't do photo editing, but whose problem is exactly that different windows have such wildly varying brightness that switching from one to another often makes everything look either pitch dark or third-degree-interrogation light in your eyes.
Which category of people do you think there are more of? My bet is on the latter. They need... Well, if you don't want to call it "another kind of calibration", you're free to come up with another term.