[eschatology]

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.

[kllrnohj]

> 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.

Note that HDR only actually changes how bright things can get. There's zero difference in the dark regions. This is made confusing because HDR video marketing often claims it does, but it doesn't actually. HDR monitors do not, in general, have any advantage over SDR monitors in terms of the darks. Local dimming zones improve dark contrast. OLED improves dark contrast. Dynamic contrast improves dark contrast. But HDR doesn't.

[eschatology]

My understanding is that on the darker scenes (say, 0 to 5 in the brightness slider example), there is difference in luminance value with HDR but not SDR, so there is increased contrast and detail.

This matches my experience; 0 to 5 look identically black if I turn off HDR

[hulitu]

> 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

0-10 is so old century. Now it should be 0-2 (0 - default, 1 dark, 2 light,) /s