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

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

#151

Post by FireBeyond »

robertoandred wrote: post #136
FireBeyond wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.…

1080, 1200, and 1440 are all of course smaller than the 1880 vertical resolution on the 15” MBP. But it’s not just the resolution, it’s that Apple made such a high resolution usable via 2x rendering, and did so immediately for the entire system and all applications.

They are. But 1440 on a 12" laptop (like the Sony Vaio) competed well.

You can also get a 4K UHD Dell at 13".

> In fact, the only comparable laptop display in existence today would probably be the Dell XPS 17" UHD+

> But it’s not just the resolution

It was, above. Now it's the resolution and the ecosystem. "Apple did it first". "No they didn't." "Well, they were the first to do it right" ( for varying definitions of "right").

I have no particular horse in the game. In fact, my entire home ecosystem from Mac Pro to MBP to iPad, iPhone, Watch would more lean me in one particular direction, but ...

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

#152

Post by refulgentis »

bredren wrote: post #29

I’ve had the XDR Pro Display since June, and use it primarily for dev. I just trusted Apple in their focus on this direction. Suffice it to say I am very happy with it. What I like about conclusions of this piece is it points to how strategic Apple is thinking in its leverage due to the breadth of distribution of advanced hardware and software. Apple is able to set entire new standards of expectation for customers th…

There's no purer expression of a certain class of cloistered Apple-thought than this - the competitors "focus on one feature, photos at night" (come on, really?), in comparison to the focus Apple shows on a __six thousand dollar display__, which is being lauded for...checks notes...using a display-specific ICC profile, which is _tablestakes_ by every modern operating system and premium hardware manufacturer for setting colorspaces and tuning per-display at the factory, and the color profile for the display uses an artificially low white point. A banal, baseline features of displays and OS 1/6th the cost is laundered into a declaration of supremacy, and we all lose all the cool information about the underlying tech and color science we could have been discussing.

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

#153

Post by sgerenser »

Qerub wrote: post #134
deergomoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> […] 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 scaled down for the display, trading sharpness for screen space. My understanding of how scaled resolutions in macOS work is that graphics are always rendered at the display's native resolution. The scaling factor only decides the sizing of the rendered elements. Can you po…

deergomoo is correct, Apple’s “Retina” displays work by displaying all screen elements using images/icons/text rendered at 2x the liner number of pixels as their non-retina counterparts. Since it’s a fixed 2x scaling, the only way to have anything other than the native panel resolution (with elements that are 2x their non-retina number of linear pixels) is to render at a frame buffer size larger than the actual screen. Then this frame buffer is scaled (by the GPU) to fit the actual screen size. Because it’s usually scaling down and not up this theoretically results in only very minor blurring that most people don’t notice.

It used to be this non-native scaling was only an option and by default the MacBooks ran at the exact native panel resolution. But at some point that changed so the default is one “notch” on the “more space” slider. I presume most people preferred it that way as you don’t get a lot of text on the screen at the native “Retina” resolution. But the sharpness is worse than when running unscaled.

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

#154

Post by amluto »

SaladFork wrote: post #79
amluto wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant something I can open on an Apple device to see HDR in action.

The video from the screenshots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tO01J-M3g0U

I looked at that, and it does not appear to result in brighter-than-white output on my iPhone 12 mini.

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

#155

Post by sgerenser »

tomc1985 wrote: post #104
deergomoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

The default is smaller text than native, not larger.

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

#156

Post by tambourine_man »

atlantis_ wrote: post #142
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…

Am I missing something? The innovation is to ... dim LEDs so that full brightness is... more than 100%... https://youtu.be/4xgx4k83zzc

You can dim the whole OS expect the video being played. This can’t be done anywhere else at this point.

That video can have a very bright sky, for instance. You can have a bright sky and a blinding text box or neither in other OSs.

It’s also a very bright display in its own right, with 1600 nits vs the 300-400 of a regular one. And 1,000,000:1 contrast as well.

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

#157

Post by bamboleo »

I had noticed this on my iPhone 11 Pro and I hate it. HDR doesn’t give you “whiter than white”, it just adds more steps of gray.

White is white. White on a display is the brightest point the display can display.

What Apple is doing, as the article explained, is showing regular white as gray. That’s not cool, that just stupid. It’s exactly what TVs at Best Buy do when showing SD vs HD content: They ruin the regular image just so you can see the difference.

The issue is that my monitor is not a demo display, it’s what I use sometimes in daylight, and I’d very much appreciate that extra brightness that Apple takes away from me.

You know what this means for you? Everything you see and watch on your computer is not a bright as it could be. On an LCD screen that’s a big deal because suddenly your blacks are brighter (because of the backlight at 100%) and your whites are dimmer (because Apple saves brightness on the off chance that you have HDR content)

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

#158

Post by sp332 »

bamboleo wrote: post #157

I had noticed this on my iPhone 11 Pro and I hate it. HDR doesn’t give you “whiter than white”, it just adds more steps of gray. White is white. White on a display is the brightest point the display can display. What Apple is doing, as the article explained, is showing regular white as gray. That’s not cool, that just stupid. It’s exactly what TVs at Best Buy do when showing SD vs HD content: They ruin the regular im…

The article says that if you turn your brightness up, the effect goes away. Is that true for the iPhone as well?

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

#159

Post by sp332 »

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…

Interesting, the article says that screenshots look fine. Are you using a third-party capture tool?

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

#160

Post by sgerenser »

CharlesW wrote: post #115
deergomoo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bit of a random rant, but despite being so common, 27” at 4K is a really poor combination for a computer monitor. At 1x scaling, everything is too small, but at 2x scaling it’s far too big. So you have to go for a non-integer scale, which on macOS at least results in reduced image quality and graphics performance (it renders to a different sized frame buffer and then scales it). The ideal is 5K, which is double 2560x…

> …essentially the only 5K displays available are the LG one made in partnership with Apple, which is over a grand and has numerous quality issues… Are these documented anywhere? I have one (it's glorious) and I've not had a problem with it, but it'd be interesting to see the list.

I’ve seen lots of reports of interference with WiFi and/or Bluetooth on the older models (I believe since fixed). Recent models have lots of reports of bad backlight uniformity: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/lg-5k-ultrafine-27md5kl...
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