Understanding Dynamic Color Range can improve the quality of anything your computer, or device, displays.
In this post we will explain what SDR and HDR are. We will also explain the difference between the two, how to adjust the settings if your device can support it, or how to determine if HDR is on by default.
SDR vs HDR
The terms SDR and HDR are short for standard dynamic range, and high dynamic range. These are mainly managed through operating system settings. We will go over which your device may be using later in the post.
Before we get into the technical aspect of what these are, we must first talk about what they effect. They effect picture quality and how much vibrancy and variation we have with regards to the colors that are being displayed. These settings are beneficial for gamers, video and photo editors, and casual media streamers.
There are many intermingling aspects that determine the quality a computer monitor can display. Color range is a big aspect of that.
Aspects of Display
Range refers to the luminance of colors displayed on a monitor, TV, or your screen on any type of display device. In simpler terms, HDR can make your device display a greater range of colors. More near perfect black, more vibrant whites and everything in-between. In part, HDR has better contrast due to its higher color range.
Brightness is also a factor in the differentiation between HDR and SDR. This is measured in nits, a unit whose value tells you the brightness of the screen.
Nit is not an acronym for a more technical term. It comes from the Latin word “Nitere” which means “to shine.”
SDR can be up to 100 nits maximum, whereas HDR is a minimum of 400 nits. HDR can get up to 4k+ nits depending on the quality of screen.
To show how big of a difference it can make, HDR offers up to 1 billion colors, while SDR only offers 16 million.
Generally devices use SDR. It is compatible with more hardware, making it a better default option. Some devices that support HDR may not even be using it because of this, which leads us to our next topic of device support and how to enable it if it’s off.
Device support and how to enable it
Whether or not your device supports HDR is all dependent on the quality of your screen and the system that is giving that screen its display.
Some computers can display everything in HDR, not just video, whereas others can only use it to stream video and can’t display things such as games in HDR. Sometimes the inability to use HDR entirely can be caused by more than one aspect of the device. For example some devices will not have graphical units or adapters capable of HDR, whereas other devices may not have a good enough screen. Sometimes it can even be limited due to use of an old cable.
On Windows Desktops and Laptops you can type HDR into your search bar and it will tell you whether your computer is capable of using it. In the example below this device being used is capable of streaming HDR video, but not capable of using HDR with an apps or graphical processing.
For MacOS you can check here to see if your device is compatible.
For Mac laptops go to your Apple Menu >System Settings/Preferences and click on Battery or Energy Saver. Click the options button and check to see if “Optimize video streaming while on battery” is on. Having this on will prioritize battery life over HDR video streaming. You can either deselect this box or plug it in to use HDR.
iPhones X and beyond have HDR displays. For Androids you will need to look up the model and see if that specific model’s screen is capable of it.
Certain phones and cameras boast about being able to take images in HDR.
Summary
Since there is so much variance in device quality, even products inherently using HDR may not display as vibrantly as on a higher quality device.
It’s important to remember there are lots of factors that go into the quality of a display, choosing to use HDR is simply taking advantage of that.
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