What is HDR, anyway?

Post by alerighi » Mon, May 26, 2025, 3:36 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #241

alerighi wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't either see a point of having 4K TV vs 1080p TV. To me is just marketing, I have at my house both a 4K and a 1080p and from a normal viewing distance (that is 3/4 meters) you don't see differences. Also in my country (Italy) TV transmissions are 1080i at best, a lot are still 570i (PAL resolution). Streaming media can be 4K (if you have enough bandwidth to stream it at that resolution, which I don't have at my…

You still watch broadcast TV? Jokes aside, when a 4k TV has a good upscaler, it's hard to tell the difference between 1080 and 4k. Not impossible; I certainly can, but 1080 isn't distracting .

Well, if it was for me I wouldn't even have a TV at home since I wouldn't use it (and thus I would also save the TV tax that we have to pay in our country if we own one). But my girlfriend watches a lot of TV, and I often watch it with her of course, thus I have two TVs.

Post by simoncion » Wed, May 28, 2025, 12:06 AM UTC

xienze wrote: post #225

simoncion wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a year or two after it launched, The Division 2 was a really, really good example of HDR done right. The game had (has?) a day/night cycle, and it had a really good control of the brightness throughout the day. More importantly, it made very good use of the wide color gamut available to it. I stopped playing that game for several years, and when I went back to it, the color and brightness had been wrecked to all…

> I have heard that it's received wisdom that gamers complain that HDR modes are "too dark", so perhaps that's part of why they ruined their game's renderer. A lot of people have cheap panels that claim HDR support (read: can display an HDR signal) but have garbage color space coverage, no local dimming, etc. and to them, HDR ends up looking muted.

For what it's worth, I have a monitor with VA panel that has no local dimming. It has a maximum brightness of a bit shy of 380 nits, and a real contrast ratio of ~3000:1, so HDR stuff ends up looking fine in dim rooms.

I would much rather have this monitor than one the "zoned" backlights that I've seen. They inevitably put nasty, nasty halos around medium-to-high-contrast parts of the picture. IME, any local dimming scheme that's less fine-grained than per-pixel dimming is simply not good enough.

Re: What is HDR, anyway?

Re: What is HDR, anyway?