Hacker News Reader

Comment by itopaloglu83 | Hacker News Reader

It looks great on the photos I took myself, but I wish there was a way to turn HDR off for certain apps or at least on demand. There are some YouTube videos online that I cannot even watch because they get too bright and saturated.

View on HN

It has always struck me as strange and user-hostile that most of the computing and entertainment world has decided to couple together the transition from SDR to HDR with a conceptually unrelated switch from relative to absolute brightness scales, and to not really make any effort to explain to users what's going on with that.

I think the main issue is devices treating SDR as inherently dim, and then upgrading HDR to extremely bright. I want my SDR white as bright as the brightest HDR white -- or at the very least configurable to that. Then HDR wouldn't be such a flashbang. And I wouldn't be leaving most of my display's capability on the table in daily use -- it's super annoying that my display is capable of more than doubling its brightness, but just doesn't, whenever I don't happen to be watching an HDR movie. To me, brighter is better as long as it preserves color accuracy. There are third-party apps to increase the display's brightness, but it causes weird issues on my MacBook's MiniLED display by making the cursor a noticeable drop in backlight intensity. Hopefully, the OLED MacBooks fix this, one of these years -- I always hated how obvious MiniLED's backlight zones are

I wrote superbright to be able to force it: https://github.com/captn3m0/superbright (fork of BrightIntosh). The display does get hit after 10-15 minutes of this though.

Yeah, that's one of those third-party apps, though not one that I've seen before -- but it has the same issue of just plain feeling weird. At the end of the day, a hacky solution is a hacky solution, but I honestly can't wait until OLED makes the backlight obsolete.

I mean it is conceptually related. Half the point of HDR is that the filmmaker can say “I want this bit to be this bright (or dark)” and then it’s that bright when I play it back myself

So you're just repeating the assertion that SDR vs HDR and absolute vs relative brightness aren't orthogonal, but haven't even attempted to explain or construct an argument to justify the assertion.

I think it's quite obvious that you can have a system to represent 17 stops of dynamic range without anchoring brightness to an absolute scale, and that you can have a system to represent 6 stops of dynamic range that is anchored to an absolute brightness scale. The two properties are separable.

The only reason that you can get away with saying "half the point of HDR is that the filmmaker can say I want this bit to be this bright" is because of exactly the conflation I'm criticizing: the "HDR" label as used for marketing was redefined to mean high dynamic range plus a standard representation that encodes absolute brightness.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com