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What is HDR, anyway?

(www.lux.camera)
790 points _kush | 5 comments | 14 May 25 12:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.991s | source
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aidenn0 ◴[14 May 25 15:01 UTC] No.43985366[source]▶
> A big problem is that it costs the TV, Film, and Photography industries billions of dollars (and a bajillion hours of work) to upgrade their infrastructure. For context, it took well over a decade for HDTV to reach critical mass.

This is also true for consumers. I don't own a single 4k or HDR display. I probably won't own an HDR display until my TV dies, and I probably won't own a 4k display until I replace my work screen, at which point I'll also replace one of my home screens so I can remote into it without scaling.

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gwbas1c ◴[14 May 25 15:52 UTC] No.43985991[source]▶
> I don't own a single 4k or HDR display

Don't feel like you have to. I bought a giant fancy TV with it, and even though it's impressive, it's kinda like ultra-hifi-audio. I don't miss it when I watch the same show on one of my older TVs.

If you ever do get it, I suggest doing for a TV that you watch with your full attention, and watching TV / movies in the dark. It's not very useful on a TV that you might turn on while doing housework; but very useful when you are actively watching TV with your full attention.

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1. alerighi ◴[14 May 25 16:03 UTC] No.43986133[source]▶
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 house). Sure, if you download pirated movies you find it at 4K, and if you have the bandwidth to afford it... sure.

But even there, sometimes is better a well done 1080p movie than an hyper compressed 4K one, since you see compression artifacts.

To me 1080p, and maybe even 720p, is enough for TV vision. Well, sometimes I miss the CRT TVs, they where low resolution but for example had a much better picture quality than most modern 4K LCD TV where black scenes are gray (I know there is OLED, but is too expensive and has other issues).

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2. zamadatix ◴[14 May 25 17:11 UTC] No.43986907[source]▶
For TVs under ~80" I feel like you'd have to be sitting abnormally close to your TV for it to matter much. At the same time I think the cost difference between producing 1080p and 4k panels is so low it probably doesn't matter. Like you say, things like the backlight technology (or lack thereof) make a much bigger difference in perceived quality but that's also where the actual cost comes in.
3. kjkjadksj ◴[14 May 25 17:19 UTC] No.43987004[source]▶
I feel the same way. To be honest even the laptop retina screen is excess. I sometimes go back to a 2012 non retina macbook pro and to be honest at normal laptop viewing angles, you can’t really discern pixels. Biggest difference is display scaling but I have my retina scaled at what the old display would be anyhow because otherwise its too small.

Kind of crazy no one thought of this aspect and we just march on to higher resolution and the required hardware for that.

4. some-guy ◴[14 May 25 17:50 UTC] No.43987352[source]▶
I agree about 4k vs non-4k. I will say going OLED was a huge upgrade, even for SDR content. HDR content is hit-or-miss...I find some of it is tastefully done but in many cases is overdone.

My own movie collection is mostly 2-4GB SDR 1080p files and looks wonderful.

5. gwbas1c ◴[14 May 25 23:15 UTC] No.43990173[source]▶
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.