What is HDR, anyway?

So, HN, are HDR monitors worth it? I remember ~10 years ago delaying my monitor purchase for the HDR one that was right around the corner, but never (in my purchasing scope) became available. Time for another look?

The utility of HDR (as described in the article) is without question. It's amazing looking at an outdoors (or indoors with windows) scene with your Mk-1 eyeballs, then taking a photo and looking at it on a phone or PC screen. The pic fails to capture what your eyes see for lighting range.

Yes but with asterisks; Best way I can describe it:

You know the 0-10 brightness slider you have to pick at the start of a game? Imagine setting it to 0 and still being able to spot the faint dark spot. The dynamic range of things you can see is so much expanded.

Early HDR screens were very limited (limited dimming zones, buggy implementation) but if you get one post 2024 (esp the oled ones) they are quite decent. However it needs to be supported at many layers: not just the monitor, but also the operating system, and the content. There are not many games with proper HDR implementation; and even if there is, it may be bad and look worse — the OS can hijack the rendering pipeline and provide HDR map for you (Nvidia RTX HDR) which is a gamble: it may look bleh, but sometimes also better than the native HDR implementation the game has).

But when everything works properly, wow it looks amazing.