I got a samsung monitor last year too (it was the cheapest hdr option and I keep seeing reddit praise them) and it has such a terrible hdr experience. When hdr is on either dark colors are light grayish, brights are too dark, darks are crushed, everything's too bright or colors are over saturated. I've tried every combination of adjusting brightness / gamma from the screen and/or from kde but couldn't figure out a simple way to easily turn down the brightness at night without some sort of image issue popping up. So recently I gave up and turned hdr off. Still can't use the kde brightness slider without fucking up the image but at least the monitor's brightness slider works now.

Also if there are very few bright areas on the screen it further decreases its overall screen brightness, which also affects color saturation bcz of course.

Also also just discovered freesync and vrr are two different toggles in two different menus for some fucking reason and if you only enable freesync like I did you get a flickering screen

I really wish there was a 'no smart image fuckery' toggle in the settings.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

I didn’t really understand the benefit of HDR until I got a monitor that actually supports it.

And I don’t mean simply can process the 10-bit color values, I mean has a peak brightness of at least 1000 nits.

That’s how they trick you. They make cheap monitors that can process the HDR signal and so have an “HDR” mode, and your computer will output an HDR signal, but at best it’s not really different from the non-HDR mode because the monitor can’t physically produce a high dynamic range image.

If you actually want to see an HDR difference, you need to get something like a 1000-nit OLED monitor (note that “LED” often just refers to an LCD monitor with an LED backlight). Something like one of these: https://www.displayninja.com/best-oled-monitor/

These aren’t cheap. I don’t think I’ve seen one for less than maybe $700. That’s how much it costs unfortunately. I wouldn’t trust a monitor that claims to be HDR for $300.

When you display an HDR signal on a non-HDR display, there are basically two ways to go about it: either you scale the peak brightness to fit within the display’s capabilities (resulting in a dark image like in OP’s example), or you let the peak brightness max out at the screen’s maximum (kinda “more correct” but may result in parts of the image looking “washed out”).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

See my "set 2" links above. (at the time) $3,200 8K television, "If you want the brightest image possible, use the default Dynamic Mode settings with Local Dimming set to ‘High’, as we were able to get 1666 nits in the 10% peak window test."

HDR still trash.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

8K TVs are all LCD and $3200 is on the low end of 8K TVs. So yeah of course you’d get a trash image.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Nope, it does have wide color gamut and high-ish brightness, wouldn't buy unless reviews said it was ok. But it does some fuckery to the image I can only imagine could be to make non-hdr content pop on windows but ends up messing up the image coming from kde. I can set it up to look alright in either in a light or dark environment but the problem is I can't quickly switch between them without fiddling with all the settings again.

Compared to my cooler master a grayscale gradient on it has a much sharper transition from crushed bright to gray but then gets darker much slower as well, to a point where unless a color is black it appears darker on the cm despite it having an ips screen. Said gray also shows up as huge and very noticable red green and blue bands on it, again unlike the cm which also has banding but at least the tones of gray are similiar.

Also unrelated but just noticed while testing the monitors, max sdr brightness slider of kde seems to have changed again. Hdr content gets darker on the last 200 nits while sdr gets brighter. Does anyone know anything about that? I don't think that's how it's supposed to work

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yeesh sounds like your monitors color output is badly calibrated :/. Fixing that requires an OS level calibration tool. I’ve only ever done this on macOS so I’m not sure where it is on Windows or Linux.

Also in general I wouldn’t use the non-hdr to hdr conversion features. Most of them aren’t very good. Also a lot of Linux distros don’t have HDR support (at least the one I’m using doesn’t).