Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

prolost.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 214 posts

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#101

Post by no_op »

crazygringo wrote: post #99
janci wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it. Are they compressing the range of SDR display for SDR content so that HDR content can now use the full SDR range of SDR display? As in "we crippled your SDR display so that you can more enjoy the HDR content and buy an expensive HDR display to be back at the normal SDR range for SDR content"?

No, at least not on my Mac. Nothing's crippled, don't worry. If my screen is already at 100% brightness then there's no HDR effect. 100% brightness is true 100% brightness, the max capability of my backlight. The only difference is that if my screen is at less than 100% brightness, the HDR content can be brighter than the rest of the screen because it has the headroom. Does that make sense?

On conventional LCD displays you are presumably losing some contrast in SDR content here, because running the backlight brighter to allow for this will also elevate black. The rumor mill suggests Apple is planning a move to Mini-LED displays with thousands of local dimming zones, which would handily address this.

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#102

Post by dognotdog »

formerly_proven wrote: post #74
tesseract wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS has also had system-wide color management and calibration (ColorSync) since the early 90s, part of its legacy of being the preferred platform for desktop publishing. On Windows the systemwide "color management" basically consists of assigning a default color profile that applications can choose to use - which is generally only done by professional design/photo/video software, and not by the desktop or most "no…

Windows color management is pretty much just a folder where ICC files go to die. Everything needs to be done by the application. Nothing is color managed by default. This alone makes HDR displays (which aren't sRGB in HDR mode) less than worthless on Windows. The situation is identical on Linux, which copied the Windows approach.

Is there a way to get Windows to behave better? I was sorely disappointed by how things look in HDR mode, especially the fact that gamut seems to be abysmal compared to the same display in SDR mode, not even considering the terrible black level artifacting :/

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#103

Post by Joeri »

Androider wrote: post #57
crazygringo wrote: post #36

Wow, that's crazy, it actually works -- just tried out the sample videos in QuickTime on my 2016 13" MBP (P3 gamut, running Big Sur) and confirmed working. Basically: if I set my display to ~75% brightness and open the video, the whites in the video are 100% brightness, way brighter than #FFF interface white on the rest of my screen. But if I increase my display brightness to 100%, the whites in the video are the sam…

> it's flawlessly undetectable in terms of brightness -- the interface white and grays don't change at all. In order to pull this off, you need to know exactly how many nits bright the display is, as well as having complete software control of the actual hardware brightness. On Windows, you have neither. Enabling HDR mode completely throws off your current colors and desktop brightness and you have to reset both your…

So basically until displays advertise their physical specifications to Windows, and the Windows display stack takes advantage of that to auto-calibrate, it cannot match this kind of output.

I wonder what happens if you try this on the LG 5K hooked up to a mac. It is physically the same panel that's in the iMac, so in theory it can present the same range. But if the OS needs to know the exact physical abilities of the display, it might not be able to detect that LG display. Or maybe apple does detect it, because they partnered with LG.

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#104

Post by tomc1985 »

deergomoo wrote: post #98
qubitcoder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in recent weeks: - M1 [0] - A14 in the iPhone 12 Pro (first 5-nanometer chip with 11.8 billion transistors) [1] Previously, they introduced the first 64-bit CPU in a mobile device, which stunned competitors at the time [2]. Not to mention their excellence in hi-dpi displays. In 2012, Apple launched the MacBook Pro a with "retina" display. It took _years_ for non-Apple alternatives to materialize. In fact, the on…

> In 2012, Apple launched the MacBook Pro a with "retina" display. It took _years_ for non-Apple alternatives to materialize. Ironically this is now somewhere they could stand to improve. The MacBook displays are excellent, particularly when it comes to colour reproduction, but for the past several years they default to a scaled display mode. For anyone not familiar, the frame buffer is a higher resolution, and scale…

It's easy enough to set them to the native resolution first thing. They probably noticed a lot of people don't like small text and so they set the default to scaled

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#105

Post by girvo »

Dahoon wrote: post #65
jjtheblunt wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple does many things, but certainly not bleeding-edge innovation. What? Having been in the inner sanctum of engineering within Apple for years, that's exactly the engineering priority for groups I saw and worked within. I'm genuinely curious why you assert otherwise, find it surprising.

Apple is know for taking something others invented and making it better/more user-friendly. That's great but it isn't being bleeding edge. Like the first few iPhones. Smartphones made better, but without simple functions like copy and paste for generations. I find it surprising anyone thinks apple's strength is being bleeding edge innovative. It can be counted on one hand how many times they have been so.

As someone who adopted smartphones years before the iPhone: anyone who thinks the iPhone was just “incremental” is deluding themselves. The capacitive display alone was a game changer, let alone everything else.

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#106

Post by rdw »

skavi wrote: post #6

> This EDR display philosophy is so important to Apple that they are willing to spend battery life on it. When you map “white” down to gray, you have to drive the LED backlight brighter for the same perceived screen brightness, using more power. Apple has your laptop doing this all the time, on the off chance that some HDR pixels come along to occupy that headroom. This is a bit misleading. The backlight isn’t at a h…

Yes, this is what I came to see. It gradually increases the brightness over 5 seconds on my Catalina Macbook. It's very impressive that there are no visible brightness changes on the rest of the screen when the brightness of the backlight increases.

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#107

Post by ambicapter »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #8
renewiltord wrote: post #3

I wonder how a large organization does something like this successfully. Like you need your OS video driver team working with the application team and so on. My impression is that PMing this is really hard. And then each of the other guys is going to have an opinion that this shouldn't be done because it's so rare, etc. Something must be organizationally right for something like this capable engineering to have succe…

Apple has a functional organisation structure which is quite unusual for a corporation of that size. https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...

What are some other companies that also have this structure?

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#108

Post by janci »

no_op wrote: post #101
crazygringo wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, at least not on my Mac. Nothing's crippled, don't worry. If my screen is already at 100% brightness then there's no HDR effect. 100% brightness is true 100% brightness, the max capability of my backlight. The only difference is that if my screen is at less than 100% brightness, the HDR content can be brighter than the rest of the screen because it has the headroom. Does that make sense?

On conventional LCD displays you are presumably losing some contrast in SDR content here, because running the backlight brighter to allow for this will also elevate black. The rumor mill suggests Apple is planning a move to Mini-LED displays with thousands of local dimming zones, which would handily address this.

Not only contrast, but also the gamut. If display is capable of 255 levels of color and you remap 255 to e.g. 128 to leave the rest for HDR you have only half of the possible colors available for SDR. Or how is this supposed to work?

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#109

Post by ArchOversight »

zimpenfish wrote: post #81
ArchOversight wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you say that the MacBook Air with M1 can't play HDR content on external displays? The MacBook Air with M1 has two USB 4 ports. USB 4 is Thunderbolt 3 + some extra bits. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201736 for information.

The "Mac models that support HDR" table on https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210980 says that MacBook Airs introduced after 2018 can only do SDR on external displays - if it doesn't include the 2020 Air, they'd surely have called that out?

You are right. I totally missed the SDR/HDR distinction because it is a single character difference.

My apologies!

Re: Apple’s “Extended Dynamic Range” Brings HDR to Non-HDR Displays

#110

Post by FireBeyond »

qubitcoder wrote: post #80
Dahoon wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is know for taking something others invented and making it better/more user-friendly. That's great but it isn't being bleeding edge. Like the first few iPhones. Smartphones made better, but without simple functions like copy and paste for generations. I find it surprising anyone thinks apple's strength is being bleeding edge innovative. It can be counted on one hand how many times they have been so.

Just in recent weeks: - M1 [0] - A14 in the iPhone 12 Pro (first 5-nanometer chip with 11.8 billion transistors) [1] Previously, they introduced the first 64-bit CPU in a mobile device, which stunned competitors at the time [2]. Not to mention their excellence in hi-dpi displays. In 2012, Apple launched the MacBook Pro a with "retina" display. It took _years_ for non-Apple alternatives to materialize. In fact, the on…

> In 2012, Apple launched the MacBook Pro a with "retina" display. It took _years_ for non-Apple alternatives to materialize. In fact, the only comparable laptop display in existence today would probably be the Dell XPS 17" UHD+ (which I own, and it's excellent).

Uhh, both Sony and Dell had 1080p, 1200 vertical and then QHD laptops in form factors down to 13" before Apple. I owned both before I moved to Apple myself.

You can read people here talking about how their laptops have had high res displays when Apple announced "Retina" back in 2012: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4099789

Post reply on HN