I wonder if it fundamentally only really makes sense for film, video games, etc. where a person will actually tune the range per scene. Plus, only when played on half decent monitors that don’t just squash BT.2020 so they can say HDR on the brochure.

The HDR implementation in Windows 11 is fine. And it's not even that bad in 11 in terms of titles and content officially supporting HDR. Most of the ideas that it's "bad" comes from the "cheap monitor" part, not windows.

I have zero issues and only an exceptional image on W11 with a PG32UQX.

The only time I shoot HDR on anything is because I plan on crushing the shadows/raising highlights after the fact. S curves all the way. Get all the dynamic range you can and then dial in the look. Otherwise it just looks like a flat washed out mess most of the time

Or a photo viewer, which isn't necessarily running in fullscreen.

What if they did HDR for audio? So an audio file can tell your speakers to output at 300% of the normal max volume, even more than what compression can do.

Interestingly, the loudness war was essentially fixed by the streaming services. They were in a similar situation as Tik Tok is now.

I was about to write that. The algorithm need to be chosen, what is mostly used for audio gain normalization? Rolling average?

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Every phone has it, it’s called “power save mode” on most devices and provides additional advantages like preventing apps from doing too much stuff in the background. =)

Funnily enough HDR already has to detect this problem, because most HDR monitors literally do not have the power circuitry or cooling to deliver a complete white screen at maximum brightness.

My idea is: for each frame, grayscale the image, then count what percentage of the screen is above the standard white level. If more than 20% of the image is >SDR white level, then tone-map the whole video to the SDR white point.

> It's not obvious whether there's any automated way to reliably detect the difference between "use of HDR" and "abuse of HDR".

That sounds like a job our new AI overlords could probably handle. (But that might be overkill.)

> Wouldn't that just hurt the person posting it since I'd skip over a bright video?

Sure, in the same way that advertising should never work since people would just skip over a banner ad. In an ideal world, everyone would uniformly go "nope"; in our world, it's very much analogous to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war .

Not everything that glitters (or blinds) is gold.

Yup, totally agreed. I said the same thing in another comment -- HDR should be reserved only for full-screen stuff where you want to be immersed in it, like movies and TV shows.

Unless you're using a video editor or something, everything should just be SDR when it's within a user interface.

The alternative is even worse, where the whole UI is blinding you. Plus, that level of brightness isn't meant to be sustained.

The solution is for social media to be SDR, not for the UI to be HDR.

It's good if you have black text on white background, since your app can have good contrast without searing your eyes. People started switching to dark themes to avoid having their eyeballs seared monitors with the brightness high.

For things filmed with HDR in mind it's a benefit. Bummer things always get taken to the extreme.

Not sure how it works on Android, but it's such amateur UX on Apple's part.

99.9% of people expect HDR content to get capped / tone-mapped to their display's brightness setting.

That way, HDR content is just magically better. I think this is already how HDR works on non-HDR displays?

For the 0.01% of people who want something different, it should be a toggle.

Unfortunately I think this is either (A) amateur enshittification like with their keyboards 10 years ago, or (B) Apple specifically likes how it works since it forces you to see their "XDR tech" even though it's a horrible experience day to day.

But isn't it the point? Try looking at a light bulb; everything around it is so much less bright.

OTOH pointing a flaslight at your face is at least impolite. I would put a dark filter on top of HDR vdeos until a video is clicked for watching.