[HN Gopher] Display brighter-than-white color on Apple devices
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Display brighter-than-white color on Apple devices
        
       Author : ash
       Score  : 280 points
       Date   : 2023-06-19 10:07 UTC (12 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | I'm on an iPhone 14 Pro Max in Safari without power saving turned
       | on but those 2 QR codes look identical to me. I tried turning off
       | dark mode but they still look the same. What am I doing wrong
       | here?
        
         | leidenfrost wrote:
         | You need to have HDR enabled on your device
        
         | aeyes wrote:
         | Enable HDR, disable power saving and don't have screen
         | brightness on max.
        
       | dkasper wrote:
       | This hurts my eyeballs.
        
         | baxtr wrote:
         | Same for me. Can't look at it for long
        
       | shove wrote:
       | No one made the Spinal Tap joke? I'm disappointed in all of you.
       | (Again)
        
       | fifafu wrote:
       | This has been known for quite a while and can be used for
       | arbitrary HTML elements with some CSS hacks. I'm suprised no
       | "super bright" advertisements have shown up so far.
       | https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/ (Safari only)
       | 
       | On macOS you can use apps like BetterDisplay, Vivid or
       | BetterTouchTool to enable that HDR mode for the whole display,
       | which makes it significantly easier to work outside. On iOS there
       | is "Vivid Browser" - a browser that enables the HDR mode for the
       | whole screen.
        
         | alin23 wrote:
         | Lunar developer here, I also use this trick to showcase Lunar's
         | XDR Brightness: https://lunar.fyi/#xdr _(which by the way, was
         | the first app to get this feature before Vivid took over with
         | clever Twitter marketing)_
         | 
         | Some people will worry about battery and display longevity in
         | the comments so I'll also leave some notes I wrote on this:
         | https://lunar.fyi/faq#xdr-safe
         | 
         | TLDR: yes, battery and LED lifetime will take a hit.
         | 
         | It's a normal consequence of driving the LEDs to a higher
         | voltage which uses more battery power and creates more LED
         | heat.
         | 
         | macOS has an ABL (automatic brightness limiter) internally that
         | will forcefully limit the voltage based on the amount of white
         | pixels on the screen, and based on the generated heat. That ABL
         | works at a lower level and cannot be bypassed by apps like
         | Lunar or Vivid.
         | 
         | Also for the people wondering about BTT, look for the "Toggle
         | super brightness" action.
        
           | jamwil wrote:
           | I love your app. Thanks for making it.
        
         | jannes wrote:
         | I think many people learned this today. "Known to you" might
         | not be the same as "known to everybody else" :)
        
           | fifafu wrote:
           | Yep! It's just me wondering why the advertising industry
           | hasn't picked up on this, given that they are usually fast to
           | exploit any possible browser feature/quirk to push their
           | advertisements.
        
             | Schnitz wrote:
             | Isn't this the sort of thing that would give Apple an
             | excuse to detect ads and treat them differently? I'd avoid
             | that if I were a big advertiser.
        
             | jannes wrote:
             | Probably Safari users aren't their top priority right now
             | (after all the anti-tracking features that Apple added).
        
               | fifafu wrote:
               | I'd assume iOS is still one the most important markets
               | for advertisers
        
               | 411111111111111 wrote:
               | That'd heavily depend on the target audience, safari's
               | market share is tiny if it's global.
               | 
               | It should be pretty high if the target audience is US
               | only and mainly the higher income brackets, however.
        
               | alwillis wrote:
               | 2+ billion devices is not nothing.
        
               | 411111111111111 wrote:
               | Nobody said it's _numerically_ few devices.
               | 
               | It's just a question of percentages, do you really want
               | to implement something that increases the brightness of
               | your advertisement on 2-5% of your global impressions?
               | 
               | Entirely different story if your advertisement is a high
               | margin product sold on the american market, especially if
               | it's appealing to teenagers/young adults. That'd probably
               | be over 50% of impressions, though that's just me
               | guessing the number.
        
               | dawnerd wrote:
               | We pixel push ads around and deal with single browser
               | fixes so I'd say yes, advertisers do care and will spend
               | the dev time if they think there's any% rev increase.
        
               | fnordpiglet wrote:
               | I think your numbers are off by an order of magnitude :
               | 
               | https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-
               | rankings/iphone-ma...
               | 
               | Further as an advertiser I'm more interested in
               | impressions weighted by free potential spend. A knock off
               | device in Nigeria doesn't factor into my calculations vs
               | a top of the line iPhone in Norway. The latter just has
               | more money to spend.
        
               | llm_nerd wrote:
               | In the US (and many other countries) the iPhone dominates
               | every demographic except I guess the very poor? The whole
               | "teenagers" thing has never been true. Grandma has an
               | iPhone.
               | 
               | However _worldwide_ Safari accounts for over 30%+ of
               | mobile device impressions. That is an absolutely enormous
               | market. It tends to be the market with the most cash in
               | almost all markets (I 'm not trying to be a booster or
               | start some mobile platform war, and yes Samsung devices
               | are super expensive as well, but demographically you can
               | go to almost any country -- Japan, Russia, India, Brazil,
               | just about everywhere, and the top n% are dominated by
               | iPhones).
               | 
               | If advertisers aren't exploiting it it's either
               | ignorance, or more likely that the dominant ad networks
               | know it will get the ads flagged as abusive and Apple
               | will drop the hammer.
        
               | 411111111111111 wrote:
               | The discussion was about global ad impressions, which
               | include desktop use and exclude devices with working
               | adblockers.
               | 
               | Why are you suddenly quoting exaggerated mobile phone
               | market share numbers in such a context?
        
               | llm_nerd wrote:
               | All apologies for being direct, but you seem to have
               | absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Your
               | defensiveness about easily verified mobile metrics
               | betrays your real intentions here.
               | 
               | Among _all_ browser users, Safari accounts for a 20%+
               | marketshare (again, easily verified. I assume your
               | metrics were either made up or you 're just trolling?).
               | Again almost entirely the people with the most money.
               | Your _hysterical_ claim that this is too small to bother
               | with is a howler, but please keep on.
        
               | 411111111111111 wrote:
               | What are you even on about, I'm able to access the web
               | metrics for my current employers consumer facing site
               | which has single digit safari user agents, and I'm
               | betting _at least_ half of them will have enabled content
               | blockers, though I don 't have any metric for that.
               | 
               | It just depends on your target audience. Some
               | demographics have miniscule apple presence, others have
               | them as a majority. So, depending on your target
               | audience, it might not be worth it. Especially because
               | we're taking about a feature that will merely _increase
               | the brightness_ of the ad.
               | 
               | Don't interpret some idiotic agenda into a simple
               | cost/reward speculation.
               | 
               | Fwiw, this comment was written on an iPhone whilst
               | procrastinating from work. Which is coding on a MacBook
               | pro whilst checking the resulting website on an iPad Air
               | today. I'm even using AirPods Pro to listen to music...
        
           | rollcat wrote:
           | https://xkcd.com/1053/
        
         | mort96 wrote:
         | What I don't get about Apple is, why aren't things like that
         | available out of the box? Why do I need a third party tool to
         | be able to increase my display brightness?
        
           | wwalexander wrote:
           | For the same reason your car has a rev limiter.
        
           | musicale wrote:
           | Battery life - a core feature and differentiator for Apple
           | devices which is also highlighted in their marketing.
           | 
           | If they unlocked it then the devices wouldn't meet their
           | advertised battery life, and Apple could be subject to heavy
           | penalties from the FTC. Also one of the purported advantages
           | of Apple Silicon would be obscured.
           | 
           | The CPU is also underclocked for absolute power savings,
           | lower heat dissipation, and better compute per watt
           | efficiency.
           | 
           | Headphone and speaker volume are also limited below what is
           | possible in order to prevent hearing damage and speaker
           | damage.
        
             | mort96 wrote:
             | Honestly, that's pure bullshit. For my machine, Apple
             | advertises 12 hours of web browsing. They document (with a
             | footnote) that those 12 hours were measured with the
             | brightness set to medium (8 steps). With the _current_
             | available display options, you can set your display
             | brightness to a value which makes it impossible to reach
             | the advertised battery life, and the FTC obviously doesn 't
             | come after Apple for that. Why the hell would the FTC start
             | coming after Apple if you could get even less battery time
             | by cranking up the brightness even more?
             | 
             | I don't know what you mean by the CPU being "underclocked",
             | these machines don't have Intel CPUs with a base clock you
             | can compare against. But the MacBook Pro machines are
             | certainly capable of draining their batteries very quickly
             | if you try, and they get quite hot in the process. Because
             | having a whole lot of CPU and GPU compute is the very point
             | of the MacBook Pro line. The battery life while spinning
             | all GPU and CPU cores at 100% is certainly not a core
             | differentiator which is highlighted in their marketing.
        
         | taknil wrote:
         | I found out just a few days ago our company tries to be "super
         | bright" in its banner ads with .img_ad:hover { -webkit-filter:
         | brightness(120%);}
        
           | mastax wrote:
           | Great. Another feature that gets ruined by advertisers before
           | it even gets used in earnest.
        
             | artificial wrote:
             | [flagged]
        
               | Operyl wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | 111111IIIIIII wrote:
               | [flagged]
        
               | prpl wrote:
               | pun intended?
        
           | bee_rider wrote:
           | "It's 20% brighter, isn't it?"
        
             | nyreed wrote:
             | But why not just make 100% brighter and make 100% be the
             | top number and make that a little brighter?
        
               | aendruk wrote:
               | Backwards compatibility
        
               | bee_rider wrote:
               | Ruining then bit with, honestly, a pretty good point.
        
               | mattkevan wrote:
               | ...but this goes to 120%
        
         | n3storm wrote:
         | This can become an accesibility nightmare :_/
        
         | e40 wrote:
         | _> On macOS you can use apps like BetterDisplay, Vivid or
         | BetterTouchTool to enable that HDR mode for the whole display_
         | 
         | I have BTT and can't figure this out. Can you say how? Thanks.
        
           | anamexis wrote:
           | It's called "Toggle super brightness for current display,"
           | according to the changelog (3.756): https://updates.folivora.
           | ai/bettertouchtool_release_notes.ht...
        
           | jaimehrubiks wrote:
           | I cannot find it either. I'll wait a bit if he replies, else
           | I'll download one of the others but I love BTT because it
           | bundles most of the things I know in a single app. I see the
           | potential of this for working outside, specially now that
           | summer is coming :)
        
           | fifafu wrote:
           | Search the actions for ,,super brightness". However I did not
           | spend too much time implementing this and this feature
           | actually only uses public API in BTT. BetterDisplay (I'm not
           | involved in that despite the name) is my favorite app to do
           | this (and much more), but Lunar also seems great. I think
           | they work on a lower level - BTT basically just creates a HDR
           | enabled transparent window which fills the entire display(s),
           | thereby activating the super brightness everywhere on the
           | screen
        
         | brookst wrote:
         | +1 to Vivid. Being able to work outdoors with a perfectly
         | readable laptop has been life-changing.
        
           | verse wrote:
           | Doesn't that kill your battery though?
        
             | 130e13a wrote:
             | wouldn't it, in the long run, also lead to increased
             | potential for screen damage?
        
               | epcoa wrote:
               | Short answer, probably not damage but it will shorten
               | lifetime, possibly not meaningfully. It's still running
               | within spec. It will ever so slightly increase the risk
               | of premature failure as running anything closer to its
               | limits tends to do. White LEDs dim and color shift
               | gradually as they age so it will cause it to dim/shift
               | faster. On a good display this is still 10s of thousands
               | of hours of operation which is many years.
        
           | asvitkine wrote:
           | Does it work on a laptop or so you mean iPad?
        
             | dmd wrote:
             | Works on my macbook.
        
             | agloe_dreams wrote:
             | Mini LED Laptops like the 14 inch Macbook Pro. Peak
             | brightness is over 1000 nits but it is locked out by
             | default except for HDR content.
        
       | cs02rm0 wrote:
       | It displays as normal on my M1 MBP and then gradually ramps up
       | over a second or two to the superbright white. Seems better
       | suited to a static white area than a few video frames? At least
       | on this device, I guess others might be more responsive to it?
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | That's probably your OS gradually adjusting instead of just
         | jumping to the desired brightness as encoded in the video.
        
       | oniony wrote:
       | Persil are going to have a field day with this.
        
       | Zamicol wrote:
       | Browser support for "HDR" features is already in CSS. Using a
       | video over idiomatic CSS is a hack.
       | https://developer.chrome.com/articles/high-definition-css-co...
        
       | mindbyte wrote:
       | A simple website blowing my mind is very rare. And now every
       | other white seems so pale & washed out.
        
       | hbn wrote:
       | Apple did a clever thing with HDR content where it can appear
       | amongst other non-HDR content, and only the part of the screen
       | displaying the HDR content is in HDR. But in practice it looks
       | really bad and I hate every time I'm scrolling Instagram and an
       | HDR video appears in my feed. It blows my eyes out and then the
       | rest of my screen looks gray and muted for a few seconds until I
       | get the HDR content off my screen.
        
         | Joeri wrote:
         | Actually the whole screen is HDR, but the non-HDR parts are
         | dimmed to match their normal brightness. They can do this
         | because they calibrate their displays and know exactly how
         | bright they are.
         | 
         | By the way, if brightness is not maxed this works even on the
         | 400 nits macbook air m1, which they call EDR. They ramp up to
         | max brightness and dim the non-HDR parts.
        
           | mrtksn wrote:
           | It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air), they
           | must be leaving some brightness margin to allow for this to
           | work on any brightness level - maybe except for outdoor
           | lighting conditions? I had to blast the ambient light sensor
           | with my phone's flash to get the screen bright enough so that
           | the HDR content disappears. When the auto-brightness is
           | turned off, you can still see the HDR content up until the
           | top settings, just one bar down is enough to display it.
           | 
           | The switch from SDR to HDR is also interesting, when an HDR
           | content is to be displayed it slowly fades into HDR. It must
           | be tamping up the backlight of the LCD when tinting the SDR
           | content simultaneously to create the gradual brightness
           | increase effect in the HDR areas. The fact that the SDR area
           | doesn't flicker when this happens, gives me the impression
           | that the Apple do amazing screen calibration.
        
             | crazygringo wrote:
             | > _It works even if the brightness is maxed out(M1 Air)_
             | 
             | No it doesn't, I'm trying it out right now on my M1 Air. If
             | my screen brightness is max, the video isn't extra-bright
             | in Chrome or in Safari. If I turn down the screen
             | brightness, it does stand out.
             | 
             | I don't know what you're talking about having to "blast the
             | ambient light sensor" to get your screen to max brightness,
             | that's not how my M1 Air works and it's not how any Mac
             | laptop is supposed to work. That's used for "Automatically
             | adjust brightness" (which I have on) but that's overridden
             | at any moment just by using the brightness buttons on your
             | keyboard to turn it up to the max. So I'm not sure how you
             | think you've got your brightness "maxed out" but it seems
             | you don't. You might have some other setting preventing it,
             | like automatic screen dimming in battery mode.
        
               | mrtksn wrote:
               | Check this out: https://dropovercl.s3.amazonaws.com/3957b
               | c45-20b7-47b5-8910-...
               | 
               | Also, try not to get worked up for such stuff on the
               | internet. Yas it appears that when plugged to the wall,
               | it does lose the HDR-white on max brightness. Still, even
               | on max - 1, HDR is displayed properly.
               | 
               | On iPhone 14 Pro, which has the ability to display full
               | HDR content, also can't display the HDR-White when the
               | brightness is cranked up to the max.
               | 
               | In my book, M1 Air and iPhone 14 Pro are both capable of
               | displaying HDR-white. Just don't go to absolute peak
               | brightness, which only happens under direct sunlight
               | anyway("blast the ambient light sensor" part, simulating
               | extremely bright environment).
        
               | [deleted]
        
               | crazygringo wrote:
               | > _Also, try not to get worked up for such stuff on the
               | internet. Yas it appears that when plugged to the wall,
               | it does lose the HDR-white on max brightness. Still, even
               | on max - 1, HDR is displayed properly._
               | 
               | Correcting misinformation isn't "getting worked up",
               | please don't insinuate anything like that. HDR is still
               | fairly new so it's important that misinformation doesn't
               | spread.
               | 
               | And as your comment suggests, it's only because your Mac
               | is temporarily reducing its brightness in battery mode
               | (also sometimes due to heavy CPU usage, that the battery
               | can't fully drive the display and chips).
               | 
               | But your assertion that "absolute peak brightness... only
               | happens under direct sunlight" is false. As you yourself
               | are seeing, you achieve the same when merely plugged in,
               | no ambient light required.
        
           | jimnotgym wrote:
           | Hang on, Apple don't calibrate each display individual. They
           | profile a characteristic display, and then apply that
           | characteristic profile to all of their displays.
           | 
           | If you want a calibrated display you will need to buy some
           | calibration hardware! Displays change over time too...so
           | frequent calibration is needed.
        
         | mrtksn wrote:
         | When done tastefully it's actually amazing. Especially videos
         | which have bright sun illuminating some surfaces and other
         | surfaces are in the shadows. It really looks like the sun is
         | shining, I can feel the endorphin is shooting through my veins.
         | 
         | However, for some reason, the human skin tones can look very
         | weird in some conditions. Maybe the iPhone camera settings
         | should be by default off when it comes to HDR. It also
         | complicates sharing and color editing, so it's a true "pro"
         | feature.
        
           | thrashh wrote:
           | I have to agree with the iPhone camera in bright settings. It
           | doesn't look good.
           | 
           | Admittedly it can look better than my digital camera with
           | default settings but I can dial some manual settings on my
           | digital camera and the photos will come out really good.
           | 
           | It really comes down to managing dynamic range when you are
           | technically limited in capturing it.
           | 
           | A lot of people like film because because highlights roll off
           | instead of being linear with clipping like digital, but you
           | can get way better results with digital if you know what to
           | do. Unfortunately I hate how the iPhone camera does it.
        
             | nomel wrote:
             | Have you tried disabling HDR, in the camera settings, so
             | regular mapping is used?
        
           | dheera wrote:
           | Easily doable on non-Apple displays.
           | 
           | (a) Buy a high brightness monitor. There are some industrial
           | ones that go up to 1000, 2500, or even 5000 nits. A Dell
           | U2723QE, for comparison, is 400 nits.
           | 
           | (b) Scaling back ALL RGB pixel values linearly from [0,255]
           | to [0,127]. Actually, just bit shift them.
           | 
           | (c) Set monitor brightness to 100%, which cancels the effect
           | of (b) under most circumstances.
           | 
           | (c) When you want a dose of "Apple HDR" white you just issue
           | a [255,255,255] and you get a blast of 1000 nits in your
           | face.
           | 
           | In fact I think a lot of newer monitors offer 10 bits per
           | pixel of depth, and considering most images on the web are
           | still 8 bits per channel, you can do all of the above without
           | even losing color resolution from 8 to 7 bits, and instead go
           | from 10 to 9 bits, though I don't know how to implement that
           | in practice (might have to be done on the graphics driver
           | level rather than scaling down pixel values in the OS?)
        
             | saagarjha wrote:
             | This sounds to me like it would be a very poor
             | approximation of how EDR works on Apple displays.
        
           | rollcat wrote:
           | > When done tastefully it's actually amazing.
           | 
           | Same thing happened with color TV, same thing happened with
           | 3D movies... every time film technology advances, it gets
           | abused at first, until 1. people get fatigued with it, 2.
           | someone figures out how to actually use the new medium.
        
         | kllrnohj wrote:
         | Android does this as well now, depending on device support
         | https://source.android.com/docs/core/display/mixed-sdr-hdr
        
         | munchler wrote:
         | So it's basically the Spinal Tap "amp goes to 11" for displays?
         | Genius.
        
         | whalesalad wrote:
         | Always wondered wtf was going on here and now it makes sense.
        
         | cornstalks wrote:
         | Part of the problem is mobile devices often grade their videos
         | "too hot." This Demuxed[1] talk has a pretty good overview of
         | the problem in the industry and ideas for improving it (and to
         | avoid confusion, the talk is given from the perspective of
         | someone in the future looking back on HDR in the industry).
         | 
         | [1]: https://youtu.be/bYS-P2bF2TQ
        
         | kccqzy wrote:
         | Fortunately turning on Low Power Mode disables that nonsense.
         | Might as well save some battery while getting rid of this eye-
         | scorching white.
        
           | toxik wrote:
           | It in fact still works in low power mode.
        
         | flutas wrote:
         | Yup, exactly the same impression for me.
         | 
         | To me it doesn't make HDR content look better, but it makes the
         | non HDR content around it just look worse.
        
           | hbn wrote:
           | Honestly I think it kind of makes both look bad. Everything
           | else looks muted, but also the HDR content itself looks
           | cartoonishly over-saturated because your eyes are not in the
           | context of seeing colors like that on your screen as it is.
        
         | kitsunesoba wrote:
         | My opinion of this way of handling HDR is kinda mixed when it
         | comes to phones, but on computers and tablets I prefer it to
         | the way that e.g. Windows handles HDR, where non-HDR parts of
         | the screen look weirdly dim, which makes you want to only turn
         | HDR on when running a game that supports it or something like
         | that.
        
           | LelouBil wrote:
           | I have this only when turning on HDR in windows, but not in
           | my screen.
           | 
           | When both are on, it's good.
        
       | madethemcry wrote:
       | That's interesting. Every normal white feels pale and boring
       | after seeing that white. I'm not writing this as a joke,
       | everything that is supposed to be white looks like a greyish,
       | washed out white right now.
        
         | grishka wrote:
         | But eventually your vision readjusts to the old levels and
         | normal whites feel normal again.
        
           | sweetjuly wrote:
           | but some part of you will always be chasing that high again,
           | always needing that hit, that rush
        
         | xp84 wrote:
         | Same thing happens watching something projected on a screen (in
         | a room of non-zero brightness). Imagine a zebra or a
         | checkerboard projected on a white screen. When you're looking
         | at the projected image, you really see "black and white" but
         | only when you consciously reconsider and look at the margins of
         | the screen outside the image, you realize the zebra or
         | checkerboard's "black" parts are actually full white (possibly
         | even a touch brighter due to LCD) and the white parts are just
         | ultra bright white. It always amazes me that we're naturally
         | able to perceive any (reasonable) relative gradient of dark to
         | bright as though it's true black-to-white.
        
         | JLCarveth wrote:
         | At first I thought the page was playing a trick by applying a
         | tint to the page.
        
         | feintruled wrote:
         | Yes! I thought the Safari example above had just dimmed the
         | rest of the screen as a trick, but then I closed the window and
         | it was all still grey and dull. I have been spoiled now I have
         | glimpsed 'true white'.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | Most colours are relative to their surroundings anyway; there's
         | a few cool optical illusions that illustrate that like
         | https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/02/27/12-fa...
        
       | killjoywashere wrote:
       | Uh, that just made my screens darker, so kindly never do that
       | again. That's worse than a blink tag.
       | 
       | [edit] not sure why the downvotes. I have an XDR screen and it's
       | quite distracting when my entire screen goes dark for some local
       | video to get bright.
        
       | Snoozus wrote:
       | The reason you can only do this with video is to avoid burn in?
        
         | progbits wrote:
         | No standardized support in HTML/CSS. Video containers can store
         | the color profile information.
        
           | cubefox wrote:
           | I assume CSS colors are defined for an sRGB color space and
           | the iPhone displays are calibrated, so they show a smaller
           | color range than they could. OLED is able to go well beyond
           | sRGB.
        
             | adrian_b wrote:
             | Not only OLED, but most good LCD monitors support the
             | Display P3 color space (derived from DCI P3), with 30 bit
             | per pixel, which is much larger than sRGB.
             | 
             | While Safari has been supporting Display P3 for several
             | years, all major browsers support since the beginning of
             | the year CSS Color Module Level 4, which includes support
             | for Display P3 (for all the other even larger supported
             | color spaces there are no monitors or TV sets of reasonable
             | price that can display them).
             | 
             | Most monitors come from the factory configured to display
             | 24-bit sRGB colors, so the user must change the default
             | settings to be able to display 30-bit Display P3 colors.
             | 
             | However the color space only affects the maximum saturation
             | of the colors, not the maximum brightness of the colors,
             | which is determined by the brightness setting of the
             | monitor.
             | 
             | For a white brighter than the brightest normal white, it is
             | not enough to have a monitor with a wide color gamut, it
             | must also be HDR capable and the software must support HDR
             | too.
        
               | cubefox wrote:
               | I don't quite get the saturation/brightness difference
               | here. Isn't $fff "whiter" than $eee? Where whiter means
               | brighter? Then why couldn't the whitest color be even
               | whiter, and hence brighter, in a larger color space? (I
               | assume the answer is that a larger color space contains
               | colors that are "redder" or "yellower", but not "whiter",
               | for some reason.)
        
               | adrian_b wrote:
               | A color is determined by 3 numbers, when those 3 numbers
               | are chosen to be hue, saturation and brightness, that
               | means that this color cannot be distinguished from a
               | mixture of monochromatic light with a standard kind of
               | white light (e.g. D65), both lights having certain
               | radiant powers (per solid angle and/or per area).
               | 
               | In that case, the hue is the frequency or wavelength of
               | the monochromatic light, the saturation is the ratio
               | between the (weighted by the eye sensitivity curve)
               | radiant powers of the monochromatic light and of the
               | total light (so a completely saturated color is
               | monochromatic, without any added white), while the
               | brightness is the total radiant power (weighted by the
               | eye sensitivity curve).
               | 
               | The red, green and blue pixel components of a display do
               | not emit monochromatic light, unless the display is a
               | laser projector. For any non-laser display the light
               | emitted by a pixel component is equivalent with a mixture
               | of a completely saturated color of the same hue with
               | white light. This is especially obvious in the red of a
               | sRGB display, which is much less saturated than a color
               | that could be accepted as pure red. When two red colors
               | have the same hue, the more saturated color is "redder",
               | as it has less white and more red.
               | 
               | "Redder" is ambiguous as it can be also used when
               | comparing colors of the same saturation and brightness
               | but of different hues, e.g. when comparing two reddish
               | oranges, where the redder has more red and less green, or
               | when comparing two reddish purples, where the redder has
               | more red and less blue. Any color display can show any
               | color hue, the difference between the displayed color
               | spaces is only in the maximum displayed saturation, which
               | cannot exceed the saturation of the individual R, G and B
               | pixel components.
               | 
               | When you specify RGB colors, you specify only relative
               | values, i.e. by ratios vs. the RGB components of the
               | brightest white light that the monitor has been
               | configured to emit through its "brightness" setting. For
               | instance, on a certain monitor setting the "brightness"
               | to "75%" might mean that the brightest white has a
               | luminance of 100 cd/m^2, while on another monitor model
               | the same "75%" might correspond to a very different
               | luminance of white, but in any case changing the setting
               | will increase or decrease the brightness of all displayed
               | colors, without changing their hues or saturations.
               | 
               | Both "#f0f0f0" and "#e0e0e0" are white and normally one
               | would say that the former is brighter than the latter.
               | 
               | If on the axis of black to white one labels as "white"
               | the brightest white and as "gray" the white of half
               | brightness, then one may say that the former is "whiter"
               | than the latter.
               | 
               | However this usage is not recommended, because it is
               | ambiguous. It is much more common to say that a color is
               | "whiter" with the intention to say that it is less
               | saturated, i.e. it is a mixture of more white with less
               | of a monochromatic color, than to use "white" as a
               | synonym of "bright".
        
             | zokier wrote:
             | CSS color() can do Display-P3 and Rec2020
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | elvisds wrote:
         | This was explained in demo website [1] that was submitted
         | earlier today [2]
         | 
         | > It works by displaying a color whose brightness is way
         | outside the standard range of sRGB color space.
         | 
         | > Unfortunately, this color cannot be represented with CSS
         | colors (rgb(999,999,999) doesn't work) or any of the widely-
         | supported image formats. However, an HDR video can represent
         | this color.
         | 
         | [1] https://notes.dt.in.th/HDRQRCode [2]
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384625
        
           | Jasper_ wrote:
           | In theory, you could do this with the rec2020 color space
           | included in CSS Color 4. https://www.w3.org/TR/css-
           | color-4/#predefined-display-p3
        
           | jojobas wrote:
           | Using any monitor in a room with a window on a sunny day
           | you'll want to ramp up brightness way above the sRGB-mandated
           | 80cd/sqm. True sRGB colours only make sense for print
           | designers anyway, anybody else adjusts their white brightness
           | as needed. This is a gimmick and Apple's usual pioneering
           | stunt.
        
       | vardump wrote:
       | Apparently a tab with that hack consumes a ton of energy, even
       | when hidden. Weird. Google Chrome, MBP M2 16".
        
       | orangepanda wrote:
       | What privileges a superwhite QR code has versus a regular white?
        
         | yootyootr wrote:
         | It makes regular white look dim/dull so adverts programmed to
         | take advantage of the superwhite will attract more attention.
        
         | da768 wrote:
         | Works better in plain sunlight and with barcode scanners I
         | assume. Pretty much any apps showing a barcode sets your phone
         | on full brightness.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | Any QR reader in 2023 that cannot read a black and white QR
           | code on a regular brightness phone screen should probably be
           | considered faulty...
        
             | chakintosh wrote:
             | Exactly. QR code scanning abilities of new smartphones has
             | gotten so incredibly quick at scanning the code. I barely
             | point my iPhone 14 Pro's camera at the code and it already
             | scans and displays the information. Even with the motion
             | blur on the camera as I'm pointing the phone at the code.
             | 
             | I think the focus should be more on the ability to
             | interpret damaged codes via ML capabilities as most QR
             | codes are outdoors.
        
               | jwestbury wrote:
               | Scanning an on-screen QR code is usually done with
               | barcode scanners, not with phones. Typically, barcode
               | scanners are doing the decoding on-device, and passing
               | out keyboard data (their drivers usually identify them as
               | USB HID). Unfortunately, most scanners don't have loads
               | of onboard processing power, though ability to deal with
               | damaged linear barcodes has been quite good for a long
               | time. Damaged 2D barcodes are harder to deal with, and
               | while ML may be able to solve that, it would require a
               | paradigm shift in how barcode scanners operate -- and
               | essentially bifurcate the market, as some scanners would
               | simply no longer be compatible with embedded systems, and
               | would require specialised software to function (which
               | isn't really ideal; most users of barcode scanners want
               | them to be plug-and-play).
               | 
               | (My first post-university job was doing tech support for
               | a company which sold point-of-sale equipment. I'd say
               | about 50% of my job was helping people with barcode
               | scanners.)
        
             | account42 wrote:
             | Phones typically have glossy screens which can be a real
             | problem if there are light sources in the sourrundings that
             | can be reflected - including the scanner's own lights
             | which, yes, _should_ be turned off when scanning a phone
             | barcode but this is not always the case in practice. Upping
             | the brightness of the phone display itself mitigates this.
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | Phone screens are awfully flat though - which means glare
               | from a light is typically a small area. QR codes are
               | robust to small areas being missing. In fact, a typical
               | QR code is readable with about 20% of the code missing.
        
               | michaelt wrote:
               | Not really - a large thing being reflected means a large
               | area of glare.
               | 
               | A lot of scanning takes place out of doors - think of
               | someone scanning e-tickets at a music festival or sports
               | event.
        
             | sdflhasjd wrote:
             | I've been doing some work in this space (eticketing) and
             | it's not as easy as you think. OK, 95% of the time it
             | works, but that's not good enough and when you move into
             | the "real world" - cracked screens, smudges, glare, dirty
             | sensors it gets worse. The failure cases waste a huge
             | amount of time.
        
             | esrauch wrote:
             | Haven't flown in a few years but I flew a ton 2017-2020 and
             | airlines could never scan the barcode on an eTicket if I
             | forgot to turn the brightness up all the way. I'm guessing
             | it is more because of glare than contrast though if that
             | makes you feel any better.
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | Airline barcodes aren't QR codes. They are Aztec codes or
               | PDF417 codes, and software for reading them is generally
               | less robust and less smart because less investment has
               | gone into clever ways to align the codes quickly. The
               | codes themselves also have less good alignment markers,
               | especially for dealing with lens distortion.
        
           | hnbad wrote:
           | Every time I'm queuing somewhere that requires scanning QR
           | codes or digital barcodes, I see some people going through
           | the back-and-forth of scans not working and the person
           | fiddling with their brightness settings or fighting auto-
           | brightness. I'd say there's a legitimate use case for this
           | right there.
        
         | Reason077 wrote:
         | A brighter display with higher contrast is more likely to work
         | reliably with certain barcode scanners. For example, I
         | sometimes struggle to get my Tesco Clubcard QR code (edit:
         | actually an Aztec code) to scan on their old (red laser) self-
         | checkout machines with my iPhone, but on my Apple Watch it
         | displays brighter and seems to work more reliably.
        
       | wolverine876 wrote:
       | The number of colors defined by software will not represent
       | exactly all the colors a system can display; the software colors
       | are arbitrarily defined and at discrete levels.
       | 
       | I expect that any system can physically output colors in addition
       | to the software definitions, including in-between colors and
       | especially, assuming the engineers left margin for error, colors
       | at the extremes of brightness and hue could be generated.
        
       | tda wrote:
       | doesn't work with firefox on my M1 MBP, but it does in safari.
        
       | xwdv wrote:
       | Is there an opposite to this such as "superblack"?
        
         | kristofferR wrote:
         | No, pixels can't be more off than completely off.
         | 
         | That's why OLEDs have "perfect blacks", it's not an
         | exaggeration, it's physically impossible to create better
         | blacks.
        
           | d_tr wrote:
           | Unless we want to be pedantic and take the ambient light
           | reflected off the screen into account. Old CRT monitors, for
           | example, reflected a lot of ambient light and looked grey
           | when turned off in a lit room. And even when operating in a
           | dark room there would be some diffusion from the lit areas of
           | the screen, which is why they did not actually have "perfect
           | blacks" like many believe. If you had a very dark scene you
           | would have less internal diffusion too though so it would
           | indeed look very good. Something similar could be happening
           | in OLEDs, but yeah IMO OLEDs have perfect blacks for all
           | intents and purposes.
        
       | londons_explore wrote:
       | How many hours can I display super-white brightness before burnin
       | starts to happen?
       | 
       | If this is just designed for bright brief 'glints' of light in
       | videos, I can imagine the screen itself might be being
       | substantially overdriven, and there might well be damage if you
       | did this for hours on end (or even maybe minutes, especially on a
       | hot day).
       | 
       | OLED isn't known for longevity when displaying bright colors...
        
         | fifafu wrote:
         | people have been using Vivid or BetterDisplay for months on
         | macOS to ramp up the brightness (they are awesome for working
         | outdoors) - so far I don't think any damages have been
         | reported. The Apple displays automatically seem to dim when
         | they overheat
        
           | eyesee wrote:
           | MacBooks don't ship with OLED displays, only micro LED
           | ("XDR") displays which shouldn't be susceptible. iPhones
           | however do have OLED displays.
        
             | ryder9 wrote:
             | [dead]
        
             | londons_explore wrote:
             | > The 12.9-inch Liquid Retina XDR display has an IPS LCD
             | panel supporting a resolution of 2732x2048 pixels for a
             | total of 5.6 million pixels with 264 pixels per inch. [1]
             | 
             | "Liquid Retina XDR" is just a high end LCD. Micro LED isn't
             | yet on anything they sell. All apple devices phone-size and
             | smaller currently use OLED, and everything larger uses IPS
             | LCD.
             | 
             | [1]: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212527
        
               | girvo wrote:
               | I thought Apple also used Mini-LED though, with quite a
               | large amount of zones in comparison to most competitors?
               | At least in the 14 and 16" pro MacBooks?
               | 
               | Yes I'm aware that Mini and Micro-LED are different
               | technology
        
               | londons_explore wrote:
               | yes, but the main benefit of more zones is that you can
               | make the display thinner (it is hard to design very thin
               | light pipes for zonal displays). You also get some power
               | saving benefits, and less 'halo-ing' when displaying very
               | bright and very dark things next to eachother.
        
           | londons_explore wrote:
           | All of Apples laptop range is still LCD right, not OLED?
        
       | ornornor wrote:
       | > please don't abuse this
       | 
       | I'm preparing popcorn.
        
         | B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
         | (marquee) popcorn (\marquee)
        
       | devit wrote:
       | There probably should be a toggle or a separate brightness
       | control (i.e. "maximum brightness" and "default brightness") if
       | something like that is exposed to the web.
       | 
       | Letting content be arbitrarily much brighter than what the user
       | expects seems a terrible design, easily exploitable by
       | advertisers and all sorts of attention thieves.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | sequoia wrote:
       | Is the "normal white" toned down to reduce eye-strain?
        
       | Ralfp wrote:
       | So this is the trick that Facebook was using to make videos stand
       | out more in the feed? I've noticed they are darkening rest of the
       | page a little, but didn't know this also bumps backlighting
       | brightness.
        
         | knolan wrote:
         | This will happen with any video recorded in HDR, on iPhone 12
         | and later for example. You see it all the time on Reddit,
         | YouTube etc.
         | 
         | It probably isn't anything Facebook is doing.
        
       | ash wrote:
       | Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36384625
        
       | user_7832 wrote:
       | If anyone's curious how this physically (appears to) work - it
       | seems it boosts the backlight and applies a dark overlay on the
       | rest of the page. If the brightness on my iPad Air 4 is max, the
       | white stays the same. If it's lower then it's "super white".
        
         | dylan604 wrote:
         | On my MBP in Safari, this adjustment is done in several steps.
         | When the page loads, the image is there but takes 6-8 increases
         | before stabilizing at the final brightness. It's not a smooth
         | ramp at all.
        
         | fifafu wrote:
         | It does not apply any dark overlay, at least not on HDR
         | screens, it just looks like it does due to the big difference
         | in brightness.
         | 
         | I would assume the iPad Air 4 doesn't have a HDR screen, but
         | maybe I'm wrong. On HDR capable screens you should still see a
         | huge difference even on maximum brightness.
        
           | treecle wrote:
           | Apple does some trickery to display HDR on non HDR Apple
           | displays. Look up EDR.
        
             | AlanYx wrote:
             | On some post-2017 non-HDR Apple displays, the OS actually
             | dynamically adjusts the screen's gamma curve to simulate
             | this effect. On machines that support this, if you hold
             | Option down while opening the Display control panel,
             | there's an additional option that appears to enable/disable
             | this.
        
         | krona wrote:
         | On my 2023 M2 MBP (XDR display) there is still a large
         | difference between the white on the page at max brightness and
         | the video whiteness. In fact the video gets even brighter at
         | max brightness.
        
           | user_7832 wrote:
           | Could you try manually increasing the brightness to maximum
           | if that's possible? (Though I suspect with local dimming
           | zones and the language on the Apple website the whole display
           | can't be kept at "max" brightness, as a local zone can still
           | be brighter.)
        
         | treecle wrote:
         | It's an HDR video and it's the OS that controls how it looks.
         | If your display is HDR (OLED and Mini LED Apple displays) it
         | will brighten just the video pixels. If your display is not
         | HDR, it will do as you describe (across the whole OS, not just
         | the webpage). Apple calls this EDR I believe.
        
           | ilyt wrote:
           | That's.... terrible way to handle it. Make whole screen look
           | worse
        
             | ricardobeat wrote:
             | Are you on a MBP? It doesn't actually make anything worse,
             | it raises the screen brightness at the same time as it dims
             | the content, so it stays at the same absolute brightness
             | and the transition is imperceptible.
        
           | user_7832 wrote:
           | Yeah I think you're right. I thought that my iPad had an HDR
           | display (it's got a wide gamut coverage and can _show_ HDR
           | content) but apparently it 's not "Apple HDR".
           | 
           | Though - lots of non-OLED/miniLED displays have HDR... why
           | does Apple have a different standard?
        
             | treecle wrote:
             | I believe they do it this way because they want to be able
             | to display HDR and SDR content on the same display at the
             | same time.
        
             | rxyz wrote:
             | Because their non-hdr displays don't have enough peak
             | brightness for good looking HDR.
        
         | NikkiA wrote:
         | About 15 years ago I had a monitor from Philips that had the
         | ability to software control the backlight at a reasonably fine
         | level (I don't recall if it was actually the same resolution as
         | the display, but it pretended you could choose it per pixel).
         | 
         | The primary use case of the included software was to highlight
         | the focused window and dim the rest. Other than that, it was
         | more of a chore to use.
        
       | neoyagami wrote:
       | it makes my second screen to panic and glitch some windows when
       | this is present
        
       | unsupp0rted wrote:
       | I'm listening to Spotify on a stock M1 MacBook Pro 16", and when
       | I opened this Github demo the speakers started crackling, until I
       | closed the tab.
        
       | ko27 wrote:
       | > Unfortunately, this color cannot be represented with CSS colors
       | (rgb(999,999,999) doesn't work)
       | 
       | I think this is wrong. Browsers already support HDR with other
       | color space like this one https://oklch.com/
        
       | neoyagami wrote:
       | this makes my second screen to panic and glitch some windows when
       | this is present
        
       | kurishutofu wrote:
       | I tried experimenting with something similar using three.js a
       | while ago [0] when I saw the other post [1]. The trick was hiding
       | the HDR video in the page, allowing other elements to surpass a
       | brightness level of 1. I have a post-processing shader that
       | divides all brightness values by 2, along with CSS that applies
       | filter: brightness(2). Finally a shader material on one of the
       | spheres multiplies its fragment output by a value above one.
       | 
       | [0] https://r3f-hdr.netlify.app
       | 
       | [1] https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/
        
       | albertzeyer wrote:
       | I was wondering whether such HDR videos are also on YouTube. Yes,
       | same super white video:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n__QY3e55Lc
       | 
       | Some other random HDR video:
       | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72_rYwzLhjk
        
       | donatj wrote:
       | I've never understood why HDR is implemented in the strange way
       | it is, outside the normal color spectrum. Really seems like #fff
       | should just be the whitest white the display can physically
       | support.
        
         | marginalia_nu wrote:
         | RGB isn't an appropriate model for brightness is why.
        
           | donatj wrote:
           | Why is that? Isn't brightness just an R G and B value by
           | physical definition?
        
             | brookst wrote:
             | Our eyes are non-linear across the spectrum. #A0004F is
             | much darker than #00FF00.
             | 
             | Thats why we have the CIE colorspace and HSB/HSL/etc. All
             | of those use a nonlinear geometry that better maps to the
             | way we perceive colors.
        
               | donatj wrote:
               | Scaling the colors for our eyes seems like something for
               | some sort of psychometrics library and we'd be better
               | served having direct access the just the r g and b
               | brights control of the individual pixels
        
               | tedunangst wrote:
               | Why are we better served by wasting bits?
        
         | Jasper_ wrote:
         | That would lead to inconsistent brightness across devices --
         | white on a 2000 nits HDR TV is extremely bright, you likely
         | don't want that as a paper white background. Standardizing on
         | some good enough value of nits (usually between 80 and 200) for
         | "SDR" peak white tends to work better.
        
           | CyberDildonics wrote:
           | _That would lead to inconsistent brightness across devices_
           | 
           | Phone brightness is going to be adjusted automatically or
           | manually when someone goes from somewhere bright to somewhere
           | dark, not to mention that different phones already have
           | different brightness.
           | 
           | I'm pretty sure there is already "inconsistent brightness
           | across devices" so I don't know what this actually means.
        
         | virtualritz wrote:
         | That would be terrible for color reproduction which is what
         | most use cases are about.
         | 
         | HDR is still a niche application outside of games and VFX.
        
         | d_tr wrote:
         | Supposedly every piece of content comes tagged with some color
         | space, so the correct thing to do is to display whatever white
         | #fff maps to in that color space. Allowing the user to override
         | that could be an option.
        
         | altairprime wrote:
         | That's the color model Firefox used for the past two decades,
         | which is why HN's orange header is always eye-blastingly neon
         | on Firefox macOS compared to other browsers.
         | 
         | Thankfully the CSS Color v3 spec mandates a default of sRGB for
         | #fff codes, so Firefox will have to get with the times someday
         | soon and stop poking my eyes out with HDR-expanded sRGB colors
         | (by default).
        
         | orangepurple wrote:
         | Nearly all displays are incapable of accurately representing
         | colors at high brightness (L=100) levels. You can clearly see
         | the sRGB gamut is quite narrow within the CIELAB color space at
         | (L=100). The CIELAB color space represents all colors
         | perceptible by humans in daylight.
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SRGB_gamut_within_CIELAB_...
         | 
         | It is clear that higher brightness levels worsen color volume
         | (cubes at the bottom of page 4)
         | https://www.researchgate.net/publication/323273667_Color_vol...
        
       | msla wrote:
       | Why don't they just make #FFFFFF brighter?
        
       | Tepix wrote:
       | Note it will not show superbright colors if you are in low power
       | mode on the iPhone.
        
         | layer8 wrote:
         | Also not with Smart Invert Colors turned on (where it's still
         | white, but remains at normal brightness).
        
       | foolrush wrote:
       | "Brighter-than-white"...
       | 
       | Gilchrist enters the chat.
       | 
       | http://wexler.free.fr/library/files/gilchrist%20(1999)%20an%...
        
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