I feel your pain. I researched for a screen that doesn’t butcher HDR for weeks and I arrived at a MiniLED screen from Cooler Master of all places that for all its faults at least tries to give me the correct color :) and lo and behold, looks almost identical to the sRGB calibrated one next to it.

And if that worst case is "cheapo LCD needs to show a realistic depiction of the fucking sun" then it's no miracle your desktop comes out a "bit" on the dark side :(

That's it, basically.

(and that's also why HDR looks so good on everything Apple - the secret is simply: They care.)

But in contrast to movies where you can analyze the image ahead of time and create the metadata, Windows doesn't really know what's going to be displayed at any point in time so it just sends out the image itself, and the screens need to be prepared for the worst case.

And as an aside: That's (mostly) why HDR10+ or Dolby Vision exist. It's not that standard HDR isn't good enough, it's because the screens aren't, so you send metadata with the signal that tells the screen how "bad" it is in order for the screen to adjust its tone mapping to what's actually needed.

There are also some screens that have a wider color gamut than sRGB and just display SDR content with that one. So if you can't or won't set your screen to sRGB or Rec.709 explicitly the colors are exaggerated, and suddenly the correct colors in HDR mode look boring compared to what you're used to.

So if you have a good screen that comes with proper calibration there is exactly zero difference between SDR and HDR output (and yes, those exist but weirdly enough that's never a point someone writes on the packaging, so good luck hunting for one :) )

And there is actually a flipside of this...

Good OLED or MiniLED screens (that are physically capable of actually doing HDR compared to "HDR capable" LCDs) employ a way more carefully designed curve that leaves the SDR range unharmed and only trails off where the colors approach the edges of the screen's physical limits.

So screens have to "cheat", and this means to apply tone mapping to squeeze the colors down to the screen's capabilities somehow. And this is where it all goes haywire because most cheaper screens just compress that whole wide range down to what's basically SDR with slightly brighter LCD backlight.

Simply put: Because building screens is hard, and manufacturers often cheap out in order to slap that HDR 600 logo onto the packaging.

Rec.2100 is a color space so wide you can only achieve it using three carefully calibrated lasers, and so bright no commercially available screen can pull it off.

This conversion is as correct and lossless as it gets. When converting from 8bit SDR to 10bit HDR all the color values come out the HDMI port completely unscathed (source: I measured, and I did the math myself. Here's the math by the way: www.itu.int/rec/T-REC-H....)

So why does it look all wrong?

So what Windows does when displaying SDR content on HDR screens is converting the pixels from the sRGB color space to (usually) Rec.2100 with the PQ transfer curve, and applying a linear gain in the middle (that's what the SDR content brightness setting does).

*glances at phone lying on desk*

*sneaking suspicion BoyC is secretly in the Z Up camp*

*hope for humanity diminishes*

Gute Frage. Was ich weiß, ist dass es definitiv ein irgendwie gearteter Deal mit der Modemarke war (den es dann bei der Dreamcast-Version nicht mehr gab, deswegen „Magforce Racing“). Aber warum und wie das zustande gekommen ist- kein Plan 🤷🏻‍♂️