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 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (4 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 5 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 4 days 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.

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