What is HDR, anyway?

I would love one of these however I have never seen one in my country. Super jealous haha! The tubes they use apparently were an american made tube, with most of the JVCs that were released in my country using different tubes than those released in the US market.

That being said, I do own two JVC "broadcast" monitors that I love. A 17" and a 19". They are no D-series real "TV" but.

That's not HDR either, that's tone mapping to SDR. The entire point of HDR is that you don't need to compress it because your display can actually make use of the extra bits of information. Most modern phones take true HDR pictures that look great on an HDR display.

All of it (lens flares, motion blur, film grain, DoF, tone mapping, and exposure, frame rate) are artistic choices constrained by the equipment we have to collect and present it. I think they'll always follow trends. In my entire career following film, photography, computer graphics, and game dev the only time I've heard anyone talk about how we experience any of those things is when people say humans see roughly equivalent of a 50mm lens (on 35mm film).

Just look at the trend of frame size. Film was roughly 4:3, television copied it. Film started matting/cropping the frame. It got crazy with super wide-screen to where some films used 3 projectors side-by-side and most settled on 16:9. Then television copied it. Widescreen is still seen as more "filmic." I remember being surprised working on a feature that switched to Cinemascope's aspect ratio and seeing that was only 850 pixels tall--a full frame would be about twice that.

To me, high frame rate was always just another style. My only beef was with motion-smoothing muddying up footage shot at different frame rates.

Even on my LCD TV, smooth motion like credits at certain speeds are extremely uncomfortable to look at at these frame rates.

I consider it borderline irresponsible to continue using these framerates, forcing users into frame interpolation and horrible artifacts, a decision the manufacturer might even have made for them. 120 Hz is finally becoming the norm for regular content (with monitors going to 500+ nowadays), we should at least be able to get to 60 Hz as the lower bound for regular content delivery.

Going further down for artistic value, e.g. for stop motion or actual slide shows is less of a problem in my opinion. It is not as disturbing, and if regular content was appropriately paced there would be no need for interpolation to mess with it...

> Just look at the trend of frame size.

Frame size is different from the other parameters, as it is solely a physical practicality. Bigger is better in all directions, but a cinema screen needs to fit in the building - making a building much taller is less economical than making it wider, and making it whatever it isn't right now adds novelty.

The content needs to be made for the screen with the appropriate balance of periphery and subject to not be completely wrong, so screen technology and recording technology tends to align. Economy of scale causes standardization on lenses and image circles, and the choice of aspect ratio within that circle on the film, forming a feedback loop that enforces the parameters for almost all content.

If some technology somewhere else in the stack causes a change, some will follow for the novelty but others will simply follow the reducing cost, and soon all content aligns on the format, and the majority of home TV sets will be shaped to fit the majority content it can receive.

Yes tone mapping is used on HDR images. It just doesn’t imply HDR. SDR gamma is tone mapping, for example, which the Wikipedia link you sent explains. Your claim is that Adams use of tone mapping is evidence that he is capturing “HDR content”. The paper you sent doesn’t use that language, it doesn’t ever say Adams was doing tone mapping, it says they develop a tone mapping method inspired by Adams’ zone system that extends the idea into higher dynamic range.

You’re using your own misunderstanding and mis-interpretation of my comments as evidence that they’re wrong. Hey I totally might be wrong about a lot of things, and sure maybe I’m completely non-sensical, but you certainly haven’t convinced me of that. I haven’t had trouble speaking with other people about HDR imaging, people who are HDR experts. All I’m getting out of this so far is that some people react very badly to any hint of critique.

From my perspective, I’m also only hearing bumbling errors, errors like that HDR is an adjective, that LDR doesn’t exist and nobody uses it, that using “range” is incorrect when I say it but not when you do and “window of luminance values” is better, and that Ansel Adams was doing HDR imaging.

Ben, we’re having a bona-fide miscommunication, and I wanted to fix it but I’m failing, and it feels like you’re determined not to fix it or find any common ground. In another environment we’d probably be having a friendly, productive and enlightening conversation. I’m sure there are some things I could learn from you.