Manufacturers really, trying to promote their technology, sometimes make things confusing and difficult to understand, to the point where many people confuse the HDR screen with other related concepts such as HDR Rendering, HDR Imagan or some "effects". They are photographed using filters, such as Instagram.
Understanding how HDR technology works
Obviously, it's going to be hard to teach you exactly what a real HDR looks like when you don't have a tracker with this technology, so you'll have to use analogies Understanding the concept. To be more precise, instead of simply adding an image, you can really see the real difference between SDR and HDR images in a more dynamic way.
Some questions to help you understand the concept:
- Why can't you maximize the brightness of your SDR screen to HDR?
- Why not all OLED screens have this technology?
- What influences the opposing measure?
- If the screens with this technology are so bright, why can't they see your eyes or hurt your eyes?
We will try to answer them with this example.
Considering that we are faced with an analogy because we cannot distinguish this technology from SDR viewers, the differences are illustrated by the various situations that have been exaggerated for the sake of greater understanding. Look especially at the differences that are visible on the stone wall in this area of the left, as they reach even win or lose meaning
The first thing you will notice is that it's a monochrome image, without any colors, and this has been done intentionally because it will talk about dynamic range, not color spaces, so what we like to see now light. In the manufactured HDR image you can see how it describes how it is lost on a stone wall, and this happens because even for high-light viewers, it can't be as high as the sunlight, the details have to be adjusted to stay true to the light level.
Of course, in the image you can also squeeze extra light inside the monitor's monitor levels, but that makes the view not as transparent as it would have in real life (in other words, the image is a bit too literal). It happens in the picture that some of the detail is cut off so that the white is white, and less pressure is not all white is white, to produce a gray scale. This is what the «voice map«.
The second thing you will notice is your loss definition of shadow. This is because the screen cannot be dark enough because there is not enough depth to move all the details of the shadows. This will enhance many of the fragments we throw in, so a 12-bit screen will have a better definition for these images than for a single 10-bit, for example.
Now, when it comes down to the SDR picture, the most important issue is that blacks are not entirely black and white are not whites at all. Obviously a good SDR screen doesn't look that great, but keep in mind that we're dealing with an analogy where photos have been intentionally transferred. What’s really happening is that SDR screens are not as black as black or white as white as HDR screens.
Of course, there are exceptions, because there are excellent OLED SDR screens that allow you to display pure black and white that are very bright but, going back to one of the first questions, wouldn't it be like an HDR screen? No, because there is a third difference you may not have missed, and there are additional reductions, as we explained earlier, which result in the loss of data.
Differences on screens
In the picture above we see a more simple and straightforward comparison. Here you see that in order to have a good HDR experience, you need several things at once:
- High depth.
- High light level.
- Deep black / high contrast.
- Software compatibility for everything to function properly.
The reason some OLED panels are so good they can display HDR images is because they don't have the required minimum, such as VR glasses, that can't do that because they don't have enough bandwidth. And if they can't handle multiple pieces, even if we really maximize the difference, we'll just notice the better details in other parts of the image, but not in one way or another.
What does all of this mean when you buy an HDR screen?
- LCD screens, especially IPS without local blurring through mini-LEDs, do not show actual HDR images. It's just multi-bit SDR screens and HDR software support, which converts these images to SDR because the Hardware is a display.
- The LCD screens with the LED-VA matrix can be more promising given their high degree of dynamic contrast, but have some restraint such as viewing angle.
- OLEDs do not reach a certain level of high brightness and are not real HDR, but this time the best relationships are found at such times as when you focus on the sun in the movie. In this case, in addition, it will not shine like in real life and will not hurt your eye.
Therefore, the only complete and harmless HDR solution available is screens LED-IPS + Local blur and Mini flash. It is basically an LCD screen in the LED light matrix, which helps to give that high light and deep black (because they completely turn it off).
The LCD screen compensates for the lack of resolution in LED technology, but it still has to be careful when choosing, since the marketing wants to fool us with 400 euro screens claiming to have HDR and even G-Sync but then in bright pictures they show halos excess that makes everything look like a nightmare, because of the ugly dark places.
