234 karma · joined April 29, 2021
By this reasoning, some random EU country could raise co2 emissions, stating that China is even worse. Problem is: the Planet does not care about artificial, man made boundaries.
To your last question: Yes, you should feel responsible. Who else could be? The point is to be conscious about what you do. Not everybody can be the best version of oneself, all the time, me included. However, denial is probably the worst of all reactions to this problem.
2. I especially considered calibration in my comment and others above yours.
No, it doesn’t ignore it. Your comment, however, does not go into any details I mentioned besides ‘you are wrong‘.
What is actually your argument?
No, ‘Maximum contrast everywhere’ given as a directive without consideration is not a solution and will increase the problem.
Consider things beyond HDR displays: At technology progresses, we will approach superbright display technologies which will surpass the dynamic range of the human visual system. Technically, these will be as bright as light bulbs and brighter and could be used as such. Going by that max brightness directive, we will all stare happily into a direct light source one day. Or one is happily busy dragging the brightness slider up and down the whole day, one at a time for every app and site. It won’t work. To solve this, we would need tone mapping at the latest pipeline stage, everywhere. And this will, of course, again reduce contrast, but this time, by design.
The other major problem is: by leaving it all to the users (all three dimensions of the now prevalent color model), one throws every standard out of the window. One website will send out 4000 nits, the next one 350. One display can handle it, the other cannot. Color shifts abundant. How should that be accounted for? Furthermore, your model makes it impossible to design for: this removes the visual target platform and puts legibility and qualitative design principles at the mercy of technological progress. So solve this with the tech available, there were several agreements made to specify calibration targets - which include brightness and contrast settings, aka gamma in more than one dimension.
In a perfect world, no screen would leave the factory without a built-in calibration device and an ambient light sensor.
One more problem, the constant intermixing of use cases while discussing HDR displays: not every use case needs an HDR treatment. It does not make any sense. The main problem HDR solves is that content creators are not forced to squeeze 10 pounds into an 6 pound bag anymore. And if your display supports this, you can benefit from the full color space the content creator wanted the observer to see. Which is totally nice for hundreds of use cases. However, staring at a pitch black font next to a white background which emits 20.000 cd/m^2 would be painful.
What I described earlier as exhaustion is buried in a process called visual cycle, which is a biochemical process. If enough photons of a given wavelength hitting special molecules of a part of your retina, these molecules run through a replenishing cycle after photon absorption to run through the same loop again and again. If light source is strong enough, the cycle is not adequate to account for the incoming mass of photons, essentially triggering temporary deactivation. The molecules responsible for colour vision register the inverse of the incoming wavelength, as in: the absence of all other wavelengths registered gets interpreted as the colour one sees. This essentially creates the yellow after image if one looks at an object with strong red and blue content.
This is a can of worms and there is more involved, even on the side of the emitter which is why there is measurement in watts per steradian going on but my knowledge ends here. Maybe a Biologist can chime in.
By maximising contrast, one is trading short-term legibility with long term legibility. The maximum amount of contrast is as problematic as almost no contrast. There is a maximum useable deviation to both ends. By approaching max contrast, it gets harder to read for longer periods, because your photoreceptors approaching exhaustion, creating an after image [1]. It may happen slow enough to go unnoticed for some periods but should be noticeable at the end of a day as eye strain.