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What is HDR, anyway?

lux.camera

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Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#62
> A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass.

This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#63
If anyone was hoping for a more technical explanation, I find these pages do a good job explaining the inner workings behind the format

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/bit_depth....

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/color_spac...

https://docs.krita.org/en/general_concepts/colors/scene_line...

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the point of the article? That the colloquial meaning of HDR is quite overloaded, and when people complain about HDR, they mean bad tone-mapping? I say this as someone as close to totally ignorant about photography as you can get; I personally thought the article was pretty spectacular.

But it's not the colloquial meaning, HDR is fairly well defined by e.g. ITU-R BT.2100, which addresses colorimetry, luminance and the corresponding transfer functions.

I don't think that's the colloquial meaning. If you asked 100 people on the street to describe HDR, I doubt a single person would bring up ITU-R BT.2100.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#65

Note for Firefox users - view the page in Chrome to see more of what they are talking about. I was very confused by some of the images, and it was a world of difference when I tried again in Chrome. Things began to make a lot more sense - is there a flag I am missing in Firefox on the Mac?

HDR support in Chrome (Android) looks still broken for me. For one, some of the images on the blog have a posterization effect, which is clearly wrong.

Second, the HDR effect seems to be implemented in a very crude way, which causes the whole Android UI (including the Android status bar at the top) to become brighter when HDR content is on screen. That's clearly not right. Though, of course, this might also be some issue of Android rather than Chrome, or perhaps of the Qualcomm graphics driver for my Adreno GPU, etc.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes but with asterisks; Best way I can describe it: You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you can see is so much expanded. Early HDR screens were very limited (limited dimming zones, buggy implementation) but if you get one post 2024 (esp the oled ones) they are quite decent. Ho…

> You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you can see is so much expanded. Note that HDR only actually changes how bright things can get. There's zero difference in the dark regions. This is made confusing because HDR video marketing often claims it does, but it doesn't actually.…

My understanding is that on the darker scenes (say, 0 to 5 in the brightness slider example), there is difference in luminance value with HDR but not SDR, so there is increased contrast and detail.

This matches my experience; 0 to 5 look identically black if I turn off HDR

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#67
post #62

> A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass. This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work…

To demonstrate some contrast (heh) with another data point from someone closer to the other extreme, I’ve owned a very HDR-capable monitor (the Apple Pro Display XDR) since 2020, so that’s 5 years now. Content that takes full advantage of it is still rare, but it’s getting better slowly over time.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it isn't touched on in the post, I think the issue with feeds is that platforms like Instagram have no interest in moderating HDR. For context: YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold. I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log luminance or some other reasonable metric. I don't see this happening on Instagram any time soon,…

The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in the article

[deleted]

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it isn't touched on in the post, I think the issue with feeds is that platforms like Instagram have no interest in moderating HDR. For context: YouTube automatically edits the volume of videos that have an average loudness beyond a certain threshold. I think the solution for HDR is similar penalization based on log luminance or some other reasonable metric. I don't see this happening on Instagram any time soon,…

The effect of HDR increasing views is explicitly mentioned in the article

You are replying to the article's author.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#70
post #62

> A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass. This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work…

This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.

People in the HN echo chamber over-estimate hardware adoption rates. For example, there are millions of people who went straight from CDs to streaming, without hitting the iPod era.

A few years ago on HN, there was someone who couldn't wrap their brain around the notion that even though VCRs were invented in the early 1960's that in 1980, not everyone owned one, or if they did, they only had one for the whole family.

Normal people aren't magpies who trash their kit every time something shiny comes along.

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