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What is HDR, anyway?

(www.lux.camera)
790 points _kush | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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mxfh ◴[] No.43984652[source]
Does anyone else find the hubris in the first paragraph writing as off-putting as I do?

"we finally explain what HDR actually means"

Then spends 2/3rds of the article on a tone mapping expedition, only to not address the elephant in the room, that is the almost complete absence of predictable color management in consumer-grade digital environments.

UIs are hardly ever tested in HDR: I don't want my subtitles to burn out my eyes in actual HDR display.

It is here, where you, the consumer, are as vulnerable to light in a proper dark environment for movie watching, as when raising the window curtains on a bright summer morning. (That brightness abuse by content is actually discussed here)

Dolby Vision and Apple have the lead here as a closed platforms, on the web it's simply not predictably possible yet.

Best hope is the efforts of the Color on the Web Community Group from my impression.

https://github.com/w3c/ColorWeb-CG

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willquack ◴[] No.43985887[source]
> That brightness abuse by content

I predict HDR content on the web will eventually be disabled or mitigated on popular browsers similarly to how auto-playing audio content is no longer allowed [1]

Spammers and advertisers haven't caught on yet to how abusively attention grabbing eye-searingly bright HDR content can be, but any day now they will and it'll be everywhere.

1. https://hacks.mozilla.org/2019/02/firefox-66-to-block-automa...

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1. babypuncher ◴[] No.43986434[source]
This seems like a fairly easy problem to solve from a UX standpoint, even moreso than auto-playing audio/video. Present all pages in SDR by default, let the user click a button on the toolbar or url bar to toggle HDR rendering when HDR content is detected.