91–100 of 214 posts
The industry is in a very strange place right now. HDR monitors are both quite expensive and unimpressive compared to the HDR OLED TVs.. For the 5-6k that this display from Apple costs, I would certainly expect it to be an OLED display at LEAST. But it's not. How is this the best we can get and it's NOT OLED? Dimming zones for 6k? I don't understand what's going on, I just want a nice OLED monitor that will fit on my…
It seems to me that Microsoft really makes no effort to improve subtle aspects of Windows and hardware integration. In fact, their OS is in such shambles and is a disoriented mess with respect to UI consistency. They introduced Vista, Metro, and now Fluent. Yet there's almost no coherence and the UI is now a mish-mash of XP, Metro, and Fluent era elements. By the time they announce their next UI, you can bet you'll n…
I worked at Facebook for years and it now has a similar problem. Developers are evaluated every six months on their 'impact', which results in many dropping boring work and joining teams that are doing new things, even if they aren't needed.
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When the XDR came out it was competing with monitors that were 40,000 USD and up. (With some compromises like the stand which is just an art piece and the viewing angles being squiff). If the competition is now priced competitively then that’s very good for consumers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtd7UzLJHrU Comparison with the 40k display here. Apple doesn't come very close. Sure it's much cheaper. But then why compare.
Their monitor is great for a consumer or prosumer monitor but just because it has PRO in the name doesn't mean it can dance in the ring with the actual PRO displays that are used to master million dollar motion pictures.
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The Windows HDR implementation is complete crap, exactly because they don't have have full control of the hardware stack as Apple does and can't change all the monitor settings like they would need to. When you toggle HDR on Windows, the desktop becomes dull gray and desaturated exactly because they pull down the previous desktop brightness to something less than 255. So you have to then adjust your monitor's brightn…
I haven't encountered such issues with LG C9. I don't need to touch the settings on my TV when enabling/disabling Windows HDR (which puts my TV in HDR mode), the previous SDR-mode desktop brightness is achieved in HDR mode just fine. Though I remember having read that the Windows HDR stuff works slightly differently for internal monitors (e.g. in laptops), is your experience with those?
In other words, assume SDR "Game" mode is set to Backlight 50, SDR "Cinema" mode is set to backlight 25, all other settings are equal, and, therefore, 100% white is considerably brighter in "Game" mode.
Then both values for "white" cannot possibly match a single, fixed level set by any other mode, HDR or otherwise.
It's therefore impossible for Windows or any other input source to "just work" when switching from an arbitrary SDR mode to a preset HDR mode.
Again, assuming your TV works more or less like mine, and mode switches use the most-recently-used preset in the target "mode family" (meaning not only SDR and HDR, but also Dolby Vision, which maintains its own collection of presets), and that the various presets are independent of one another.
And if this is not the case, and presets cannot be set independently, then I'm glad I don't have a newer TV, because some of my presets have color settings that are wildly different from standard calibration (e.g., a preset resetting the display to its native, uncalibrated white point and gamut, used with video players capable of internal HDR tone mapping and color correction given a custom 3D LUT generated from measurements).
#ffffff is L=100%. What is L=800%? It exists in HDR content, and we can’t just make the web color #ffffff a dim gray to the eye.
We must start thinking in terms of HSL or LAB or even RGBL, and consider that L > 100% is where HDR peak brightness lives.
HDR’s color space exceeds the luminosity that sRGB hex triplets can represent, and remapping HDR color spaces into sRGB hex gives you horrendous banding and requires complex gamma functions. The CSS colors spec is finalizing on this, but essentially we’re at the last days of hex codes being a great way to express color on the web. They’ll remain good as a last resort, but it’s time to move a step forward.
Apple is pinning sRGB hex #ffffff to “paper white” brightness because the hex color specification can’t encompass the full spectrum of monitors anymore. The different between #ffffff and #fefefe can be enormous on a display with 1800 nits of peak brightness, and if you map #ffffff to peak brightness, you burn out people’s eyes with every single web page on today’s legacy sRGB-color Internet (including Hacker News!). That’s why HDR has “paper white” at around 400 lumens in calibration routines.
So, then, sRGB hex colors have no way to express “significantly brighter than paper white #ffffff”, and UI elements have little reason to use this extended opportunity space - but HDR content does, and it’s nice to see Apple allowing it through to the display controller.
But there’s no way to make use HDR in web content - other than embedded images and videos - if we continue thinking of color in terms of hex codes. This insistence that we remap hex codes into thousands of nits of spectrum is why web colors in Firefox on an HDR display make your eyes hurt (such as the HN topbar): it’s rescaling the web to peak brightness rather than to paperwhite, and the result is physically traumatic to our vision system. Human eyes are designed for splashes of peak brightness, but when every web page is pouring light out of your monitor at full intensity, it causes eye strain and fatigue. Don’t be like Firefox in this regard.
“But how do we conceive of color, if not in hex codes?” is a great question, and it’s a complicated question. In essence you select color and brightness independent of each other, and then make sure that it looks good when peak brightness is low, and doesn’t sear your eyes when peak brightness is high.
If this interests you, and you’d like to start preparing for a future where colors can be dimmer or brighter than sRGB hex #FFFFFF, here are a couple useful links to get you started:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15534622
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22467744
As a final note, there are thermal reasons why peak brightness can be so much higher than paperwhite: your display can only use so much power for its thermal envelope. Yes, HDR displays have thermal envelopes. So overusing peak white, such as scaling #ffffff to the wrong brightness, can actually cause the total brightness of the display to drop when it hits thermal protections, while simultaneously wasting battery and hurting your users’ eyes.
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…
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I like that Dell display (I mostly use Dell and LG displays) and most people should certainly save the money. The areas where the specs aren't the same are really significant though (e.g., resolution, as you noted, is a major difference despite only being one of the specs. Brightness, dynamic brightness, and size are also quite significant and drivers of major cost differences in just about any monitor comparison.) H…
If you're only using it for light HDR work, both are almost equally usable, and if you're mastering HDR content all the time, you'll need a dual-LCD panel anyway (as the sony hxr-310). But you're right, the additional 3000$ are definitely noticeable - but if they're noticeable enough to justify that price tag is another question.
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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…
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 scaled down for the display, trading sharpness for screen space.
Evidently the drop in sharpness is imperceptible to most people, but I can certainly tell, to the point where I forego the extra space and drop it back to the native resolution.
For a company that generally prides itself on its displays, I think the right option would be to just ship higher res panels matching the default resolution.
They have also done this with certain iPhone displays over the years, but at 400+ppi it’s well within the imperceptible territory for most people. For the 200-something ppi display on the MacBooks, not so.
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…
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"?
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?
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When the XDR came out it was competing with monitors that were 40,000 USD and up. (With some compromises like the stand which is just an art piece and the viewing angles being squiff). If the competition is now priced competitively then that’s very good for consumers.
The competition was also before the XDR similarly priced. Asus had 2 or 3 at that price point, and Apple had the XDR. And then there's the Dell UP2718Q, almost entirely the exact same specs, but only 4K, at 1600€. Released 2017, years before the XDR.
The ideal is 5K, which is double 2560x1440 in each dimension, but 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, or the one built into the iMac. It’s really annoying.