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What is HDR, anyway?

lux.camera

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Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#11

Post by esperent »

the__alchemist wrote: post #4

So, HN, are HDR monitors worth it? I remember ~10 years ago delaying my monitor purchase for the HDR one that was right around the corner, but never (in my purchasing scope) became available. Time for another look? The utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and looking at it on a…

I think it depends on the screen and also what you use it for. My OLED is unusable for normal work in HDR because it's designed around only a small portion of the screen being at max brightness - reasonable for a game or movie, but the result is that a small window with white background will look really bright, but if I maximize it, it'll look washed out, grey not white.

Also the maximum brightness isn't even that bright at 800 nits, so no HDR content really looks that different. I think newer OLEDs are brighter though. I'm still happy with the screen in general, even in SDR the OLED really shines. But it made me aware not all HDR screens are equal.

Also, in my very short experiment using HDR for daily work I ran into several problems, the most serious of which was the discovery that you can no longer just screenshot something and expect it to look the same on someone else's computer.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#12

Post by kllrnohj »

the__alchemist wrote: post #4

So, HN, are HDR monitors worth it? I remember ~10 years ago delaying my monitor purchase for the HDR one that was right around the corner, but never (in my purchasing scope) became available. Time for another look? The utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and looking at it on a…

HDR gaming: Yes.

HDR full screen content: Yes.

HDR general desktop usage: No. In fact you'll probably actively dislike it to the point of just turning it off entirely. The ecosystem just isn't ready for this yet, although with things like the "constrained-high" concepts ( https://www.w3.org/TR/css-color-hdr-1/#the-dynamic-range-lim... ) this might, and hopefully does, change & improve to a more pleasing result

Also this is assuming an HDR monitor that's also a good match for your ambient environment. The big thing nobody really talks about wiith HDR is that it's really dominated by how dark you're able to get your surrounding environment such that you can push your display "brightness" (read: SDR whitepoint) lower and lower. OLED HDR monitors, for example, look fantastic in SDR and fantastic in HDR in a dark room, but if you have typical office lighting and so you want an SDR whitepoint of around 200-300 nits? Yeah, they basically don't do HDR at all anymore at that point.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#13

Post by SomeoneOnTheWeb »

the__alchemist wrote: post #4

So, HN, are HDR monitors worth it? I remember ~10 years ago delaying my monitor purchase for the HDR one that was right around the corner, but never (in my purchasing scope) became available. Time for another look? The utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and looking at it on a…

IF you have a display that can it roughly a 1000 nits, then for movies and games yes definitely the difference with SDR is pretty huge.

If you have say a 400 nits display the HDR may actually look worse than SDR. So it really depends on your screen.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#14

Post by 4ad »

the__alchemist wrote: post #6
4ad wrote: post #2

HDR is just a scene-referred image using absolute luminance.

Not in the more general sense! It can refer to what its acronym spells out directly: Bigger range between dimmest and brightest capabilities of a display, imaging technique etc.

No. HDR can encode high dynamic range because (typically) it uses floating point encoding.

From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-referred images and video, along with a set of standards for reproduction.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#15

Post by viraptor »

echo_time wrote: post #7

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?

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=hdr there's the tracking issue for HDR support.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#16

Post by [deleted] »

echo_time wrote: post #7

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?

[deleted]

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#17

Post by cornstalks »

4ad wrote: post #14
the__alchemist wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the more general sense! It can refer to what its acronym spells out directly: Bigger range between dimmest and brightest capabilities of a display, imaging technique etc.

No. HDR can encode high dynamic range because (typically) it uses floating point encoding. From a technical point of view, HDR is just a set of standards and formats for encoding absolute-luminance scene-referred images and video, along with a set of standards for reproduction.

No. HDR video (and images) don't use floating point encoding. They generally use a higher bit depth (10 bits or more vs 8 bits) to reduce banding and different transfer characteristics (i.e. PQ or HLG vs sRGB or BT.709), in addition to different YCbCr matrices and mastering metadata.

And no, it's not necessarily absolute luminance. PQ is absolute, HLG is not.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#18

Post by beachwood23 »

gyomu wrote: post #5

As a photographer, I get the appeal of (this new incarnation of) HDR content, but the practical reality is that the photos I see posted in my feeds go from making my display looking normal to having photos searing my retinas, while other content that was uniform white a second prior now looks dull gray. It's late night here so I was reading this article in dark mode, at a low display brightness - and when I got to th…

Completely agree. To me, HDR feels like the system is ignoring my screen brightness settings.

I set my screen brightness to a certain level for a reason. Please don’t just arbitrarily turn up the brightness!

There is no good way to disable HDR on photos for iPhone, either. Sure, you can turn off the HDR on photos on your iphone. But then, when you cast to a different display, the TV tries to display the photos in HDR, and it won’t look half as good.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

#19

Post by sebstefan »

For the Halide's updated Image Lab demo about 2/3rd of the way down the page (https://www.lux.camera/content/media/2025/05/skyline-edit-tr...), you made the demo so tall desktop users can't both see the sky & the controls at the same time

A lot of these design flaws are fixed by Firefox's picture in picture option but for some reason, with the way you coded it, the prompt to pop it out as PIP doesn't show up

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