5 Reasons Why HDR Kinda SUCKS | What you need to know about the current TV market

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I go over my top 5 reasons why HDR is not the breakthrough many hail it to be. Sometimes it's great but most of the time, it's a pain in butt. Before HDR, the playing field was a little more level. You could buy a top-of-the-line TV and the picture may have been nicer than a budget model, but the quality improvement wasn't as dramatic as it is today. This is just my opinion and if you love HDR, I totally respect your opinion. My opinion does not stop me from embracing the newest technology but I feel we have already reached the peak of picture quality and it's all downhill from here.

My TV recommendations:
TCL 65-inch 6-Series 4K
Hisense 65-Inch Class H8 Quantum Series

Tone Mapping:
Panasonic Streaming 4K Blu Ray Player with Dolby Vision DP-UB820

Info on madVR

Chapters:
00:00 Reason 1 - You have to pay to play
1:09 Reason 2 - It's too complicated
2:40 Reason 3 - Not backwards compatible
4:36 Reason 4 - Is it really better?
6:06 Reason 5 - It can be worse than SDR
6:37 HDR vs SDR comparison
7:48 The evolution of TVs
10:07 My recommendations
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I just bought a Samsung G8 OLED monitor. I love it. But I don't use HDR. Like you said, it makes it way too complicated. Especially on a Windows PC. Its just not worth it. I don't want to have to mess with HDR calibration on every game I play for a (in my opinion) slightly better experience.

I spent days messing with the HDR settings on my 65" Samsung QLED TV when I bought it 6 years ago. I eventually just got fed up with having to adjust settings constantly for different content and just stopped using HDR. Everyone told me HDR would blow me away. But all it has done is irritate me. What has blown me away is switching from an IPS monitor to an OLED monitor. Once I decided to stop using HDR and just use it, it has been absolutely incredible.

AdamGs
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Awesome points and I couldn't agree more.

An issue not mentioned here that I encounter is that the HDR causes eye strain and headaches to many of my friends and family that are not used to these super bright TVs.

My GF hates HDR with passion and refuses to buy any 4ks that include it.

ChrisMoviedood
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If they increase the brightness of those TV any further, people are going to need sunglasses to watch their "HDR" TV. "bUt iT's ReaLisTiC!!"

sophieedel
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I have a Optoma UHD60 projector on a 132" screen and have been struggling with the darkness of HDR. I bought the Panasonic UB40 4K player and was able to find a HDR setting of Bright and that has made my picture so much more watchable. I find black level is a tab better with HDR on then it is with it off. I kinda felt this was a HT taboo subject and if you didn't sing praises to HDR you were not a true HT guy! Thanks for coming out! ;)

outofline
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The comments I read seems crazy to me. I used to have a bad Xiaomi tv supposed to support HDR but really couldn't. I bought an LG C3 six months ago and with proper settings DV and HDR look WAY better than SDR.

Hwg
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The only way I can get reliably good looking HDR without fussing around a lot is if I use the TV's built in apps, like Youtube. And, I have to have it in the right settings mode. Very important that the color space be in auto. Otherwise the colors and contrast can go completely wonky. Once it's actually right, HDR is nicer looking. But I agree, it's too complicated right now, and 4k sdr looks excellent.

timothylink
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HDR is not HDR unless it reaches the mastering brightness of 1000 nits. 900 nits would be MINIMUM. Anything less than that cannot reproduce the high dynamic range or tonal range. Also I've noticed a lot of HDR Masters are actually SDR content upscaled to HDR and that means anything below 100 IRE (1000 IRE being the peak white) looks like absolute garbage. No tonal range from the midtones to the shadows.

So yeah any tv that isn't mini-led or qd-oled cannot produce true hdr. Also make sure the tv is color calibrated since HDR looks worse if the tv cannot reproduce the colors accurately

shueibdahirmotionpictures
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You have to watch HDR at night because it darkens the picture so much, because it is about brightness or nits. This is what people focus on and viewers perception of watching changes ...but all at the expense of the integrity of the picture which is what SDR is about.

These nits will raise your electric bill and also shorten the life of the TV...like a turbo car with 2 exhausts.

You can watch hdr stuff very easily on vlc or pot player using sdr monitor.

goldenultra
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My first experience with HDR wasnt good either, because I bought 400 nits monitor with very poor tone mapping, so HDR content was either too dim, or blown out. For example, I could see a lot more clouds detail in the sky with SDR content, while the same clouds were totally blown out with HDR. Also colors looked ugly despite wider color gamut support. If I were to base my opinion of HDR on this first bad experience, I would agree with you. I however saw how good HDR can look on better display and now I'm extremely impressed.

It's important to note that SDR content can display up to 100 nits of detail, while HDR can display up to 4000 nits of detail. With such big dynamic range in HDR container, a film director or artist does not need to clip details to the extreme, as was the case with SDR, because HDR can show more detail without clipping, or gimmicks like it was before.

Although HDR is far superior to SDR from a technical point of view, it's still possible for HDR content to look worse. This however has nothing to do with the HDR itself, but with the vision of the artist. For example, a film director can alter his vision in HDR in very different ways when he has far more colours and dynamic range to play with, and sometimes the end result can be ugly to the average person's eyes.

For example one of the Game Of Thrones episodes was criticised because it was too dark. It came down to a mixture of the filmmaker’s creative vision and the limitations of television, because TV with limited brightness and poor tone mapping will dim the image even more.

Unfortunately HDR content can look rrally bad if your display has limited brightness and poor tone mapping on top of that, but again, this has nothing to do with HDR itself, but with a not so good TV that is not up to the task of displaying HDR content. It's like watching a BD film on a 480p plasma and then saying: 1080p makes no difference.

It's important to note that some TVs have better tone mapping. My sister bought some cheap Sony LCD TV with only 400 nits of brightness (that's similar brightness as on my monitor), yet HDR content on her TV looks way better compared to my PC monitor. Dark movies look dark and without black crush, and there's very little highlight detail that I can see. Even colours are far more saturated, more vibrant and more nuanced. Of course, if you want to experience HDR in all its glory, you'll need an HDR10-capable TV (1000 nits display and preferably with pixel-level contrast control). I saw how HDR content can look on good oled and I was amazed. I used to think my Panasonic GT60 plasma had a realistic picture, but HDR content on OLED is clearly on a different level.

There are a few HDR standards, but 99% of UHD content support at least HDR10, so if yout TV is HDR10 cappable your experience will be amazing anyway and you dont need to worry about other HDR standards.

PabloB
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I actually just bought a firestick max and completely disabled HDR and DV on my A80k OLED. Its the first firestick to allow this. SDR produces a far superior picture quality It's consistent and looks good 100% of the time. Now I am no longer forced to watch these poorly implimented formats. I'll stick with beautiful 4k SDR!

tac
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6:36 Similar to my experience. I only use my LG TV for surfing the net, watching YouTube and for video gaming, and Windows 11 kept bragging (for want of a better word) that my game's HDR setting was on and good to go whenever I fired up a game to play -- and I remember thinking "LUL, okay, great -- can I get to play my game now, please, thanks?" whenever Windows stuck that message up on screen. But in the end I had to turn HDR off because 1) I couldn't notice much/any difference in the quality of the picture I was getting when playing video games and 2) (and much more importantly) when I Alt-Tabbed out of the game, more often than not the picture for the desktop (or whatever program I Alt-Tabbed into) went really dark. I mean, I'm all for bells and whistles in tech software and hardware -- the more the merrier -- but HDR definitely needs work. I just can't use it.

PeterFraser-hprs
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The biggest problem with HDR is that it does not look 'cinematic'. I have 2018 4K QLED QE55Q9FNA (DisplayCal) for computer monitor and 1080P Panasonic plasma TX-P65-VT65 and much prefer the Pany for the cinematic look.

daysofgrace
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Thanks for the information.
I've been looking at TV's for the past two years using YouTube as well as reviews on Amazon and Best Buy. We are in our 70's and disables so we have never seen a 4k TV. Our present TV is a Sony KDL-52W3000 that we bought in 2007 and it is still great. We are looking for a 75 inch tv due to my wife's AMD (partial blindness) hoping that she can see more details in a larger image. What makes it difficult in selecting an affordable TV is that I could probably see HDR affects. After hearing your discussion, I think that perhaps I should focus on a large and affordable TV, and only consider HDR as a secondary feature. Thanks for taking the time to express your viewpoint.

randallwells
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backlight bleed in from lcd made me spend up to oled a few years ago and that one consideration is the only thing that mattered for me. I think now lcd backlight bleed in is less based on reviews so I would have to sample again.

traumadisaster
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I bought my first 4k HDR disc and was also underwhelmed with the improvement over the 2k render. I think the technology is a bit too early to bring it to it's full potential. I think the 10+ bit luminosity channel could be a good step up from a lot of the dark aliasing seen in dark scenes of 8 bit luminosity but it seems that it might be wasted in practice, with the emphasis of super bright - which doesn't seem to be used all that often. This is kinda ironic, since Hollywood is also known to waste 16+ bits of dynamic range available on audio albums by squashing the shit out of the waveform with compression (e.g. the Loudness War).

Where HDR really shines and is standard practice already is in content production - especially in digital photography - allowing extra headroom to properly expose dark and bright regions of an image.

ramueller
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If you are using streaming platforms the SDR version of content will almost always look better than the HDR version. It doesn't matter if you have the best QD OLED or a flagship QLED. SDR mastering is almost always a higher quality than it's HDR counterpart. People have a hard time believing this but it's true. When you buy a new TV you are stuck using HDR so you really don't have an option to directly compare the two. This is why you need to buy an Amazon Fire Stick 4k Max has it allows you to completely disable HDR. Then you can directly compare HDR versus SDR and you will immediately see the SDR absolutely kicks HDR's ass. It sounds counterintuitive but it is 100% fact.

JohnDoe-pcqf
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I watched the 4K disc of the 2014 Godzilla with HDR off and again with it on and it looks so much better off and now I’m rewatching all my 4K discs with it off and it’s been a much more enjoyable experience, I hate the warnings on main stream releases but I’ll take that over crappy visuals

xenozillarex
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I really wish that 4K Blurays had SDR metadata to tone map. I love using a projector but I can never dial in my 4K image. I want that 4K crispy but always hard to dial in the image. It's an older projector but it still looks great in SDR 4K (Epsonm HC 4000)

I just found out that the Shield pro 2019 does tone mapping. I have a 2017 shield and now im wondering if its worth to upgrade to the new shield for the tone mapping.

I cant find any tests on the shield pro tone mapping vs bluray 1080p vs madVR vs plex. (would be a great video btw :P )

Do you think the shield pro is worth it just for the tone mapping and 4K upscaling? Just wish they would release a new one already

Edit: also we have that same brown and white blanket in our theater haha

AFryingPan
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I agree that HDR is overrated. That being said, I often find it preferable to buy the 4K UHD + 1080P combo packs as long as the 4K has Dolby Vision. As long as your TV/projector supports Dolby Vision, a Dolby Vision 4K will probably look okay. It is less about experiencing HDR and more that Dolby Vision metadata can converted the colors to play nice with SDR displays that are Dolby Vision Certified.

These combo packs help cover your bases more because you usually get to choose between two different transfers/remasters of the movie. You would be surprised how often one version of the movie has noticeable technical problems that force you to watch the other version.

For example, Raiders of the Lost Ark looks better on 4K because the old 2009 SDR blu ray is too bright and it makes the sets look fake.

Conversely, T2 looks best on the 2016 blu ray and the 4K is a hot mess with excessive DNR because some moron used the master for the 3D conversion on the 4K disc.

When in doubt, choose the SDR 1080p blu ray. If that version has a bad transfer, hopefully the 4K will be in Dolby Vision.

jakedennis
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If you want a decent HDR experience you'll need a TV with enough brightness to make any kind of HDR impact. Im not so sure how much nits your VIZIO does offer but it does not look like it is enough to fight glare in bright rooms. The coating is also pretty reflective. I went from a Siny FALD with up to 800nits to a G3 and the difference is like night and day if it comes to HDR10 or Dolby Vision. It just pops. On the other hand SDR content does look dull in comparison.

You dont even need to psy a lot of money for a really nice HDR experience. Here in EU you can get a miniLED like the TCL QM8B for just 560€ (55") and the 65" version for 700€. Youll get around 1300nits and an anti-reflective coating in order to enjoy any kind of HDR format.

daveb
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