What is HDR, anyway?

Niche, style points first kind of thing for sure.

Meta: old enough that getting either a new color not intended, or an additional one visible on screen and having the machine remain able to perform was a big deal.

Look for the word video.

Sony makes sensors for pretty much everyone else. But it's well known that other folks e.g. Nikon have been able to get better signal-to-noise with Sony-made sensors than Sony themselves. I think Panasonic used to make their own sensors but with some recent re-org, that got spun out.

It's been widely rumored that Leica uses Sony sensors, but this gets repeatedly denied by people claiming inside information. We know that Leica was getting 24MP CMOS sensors from CMOSIS in the 2012 timeframe, but CMOSIS has since been acquired by OSRAM, and there hasn't been any verifiable information since then, whether confirming or denying a continued business relationship.

I find it pretty weird that all tvs and most monitors hide the brightness adjustment under piles and piles of menus when it could be right there in the remote alongside the sound volume buttons. Maybe phones could have hardware brightness buttons too, at least something as easy as it is on adjusting brightness in notebooks that have dedicated brightness fn buttons.

Such brightness slider could also control the amount of tonemapping applied to HDR content. High brightness would mean no to low tonemapping and low brightness would use a very agressive tonemapper producing a similar image to the SDR content along it.

Also note that good audio volume attenuation requires proper loudness contour compensation (as you lower the volume you also increase the bass and treble) for things to sound reasonably good and the "tone" sound well balanced. So, adjusting the tonemapping based on the brightness isn't that far off what we do with audio.

I indeed meant motion resolution, which pixel response time only partially affects. It’s about how clearly a display shows motion, unlike static resolution which only reflects realistically a still image. Even with fast pixels, sample and hold displays blur motion unless framerate and refresh rate is high, or BFI/strobing is used. This blur immediately lowers perceived resolution the moment anything moves on screen.

> The input is expecting specific distortions and effects from scanlines and phosphor, which a "perfect" display wouldn't exhibit...

That's true for many CRT purists, but is not a huge deal for me personally. My focus is motion performance. If LCD/OLED matched CRT motion at the same refresh rate, I’d drop CRT in a heartbeat, slap on a CRT shader, and call it a day. Heresy to many CRT enthusiasts.

Ironically, this is an area in which I feel we are getting CLOSE enough with the new higher refresh OLEDs for non HDR retro content in combination with: https://blurbusters.com/crt-simulation-in-a-gpu-shader-looks... (which hopefully will continue to be improved.)

> The aggressive OLED ABL is simply a thermal issue.

Theoretically, yes and there’s been progress, but it’s still unsolved in practice. If someone shipped an OLED twice as thick and full of fans and heatsinks, I’d buy it tomorrow. But that’s not what the market wants, so obviously it's not what they make.

> It can be mitigated with thermal design in smaller devices, and anything that increases efficiency (be it micro lens arrays, stacked "tandem" panels, quantum dots, alternative emitter technology) will lower the thermal load and increase the max full panel brightness.

Sure, in theory. But so far the improvements (like QD-OLED or MLA) haven’t gone far enough. I already own panels using these. Beyond that, much of the tech isn’t in the display types I care about, or isn’t ready yet. Which is a pity, because the tandem based displays I have seen in usage are really decent.

That said, the latest G5 WOLEDs are the first I’d call acceptable for HDR at high APL, for the preferences I hold with very decent real scene brightness, at least in film. Sadly, I doubt we’ll see comparable performance in PC monitors until many years down the track and monitors are my preference.