From Real Life Magazine:
If you’ve purchased a new phone or TV in the past few years, you may have noticed that night-time viewing has caused your eyes a bit more strain. That’s because many new displays are equipped to produce, in one flavor or another, a “high dynamic range” image — HDR, for short. A fundamentally relative and fuzzy term, HDR purports to produce brighter whites and inkier blacks than have previous display technologies. The recent iPhone 12 family, for instance, touts a peak brightness of 1,200 nits. (A nit, also known as a candela per square meter, is the standard measure of luminance.) By contrast, a typical laptop display maxes out at anywhere from 400 to 600 nits.
If you are unimpressed with such reports of maximized nits, you may be validating the anxieties of display manufacturers worldwide. These companies — LG, Samsung, and others — engage in a yearly struggle to goad consumers into buying new screens, using gimmicks like 3-D capability, curved displays, and 4K resolution as lures. HDR has become a new rallying cry in the fight to catch consumer’s eyes.
From a marketing perspective, the problem with these “advancements” has been that they are often difficult to convey without the consumer seeing the difference in person. This is, absurdly, compounded by the fact that “better” screens are advertised on the “worse” screens we already have. The ensuing recourse to technical language, too, breeds its own kind of absurdity: So what that a display has 8 million pixels as opposed to 2 million? Who can, or even wants to, conceptualize what that means in experiential terms? Eventually, the display manufacturers encounter the perceptual limitations of our eyes: The ability to detect differences between screens depends on a broader set of variables than the raw technical prowess of the display. Distance from the screen, its size relative to its resolution, and other factors can dramatically affect our ability to discern any of these supposedly objective upgrades.
Yet despite a lack of generalized desire for these displays, many industry commentators and even consumers would likely agree that their widespread adoption is not a question of if, but when. What maintains this paradox? As a former reporter at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, I’ve watched how companies have developed a strategy to address the problem of consumer demand: the glint. Seemingly little more than an increase in shimmering objects and eye-catching displays, the glint in fact helps us understand the novel ways that computational capitalism tries to calibrate attention and desire....
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