HDR And The PC: It's Complicated

HDR monitors will be awesome. And awfully complicated, says Jeremy Laird.

- Jeremy Laird

Forget curved panels, frame synching, 4K, and high refresh rates. There’s a new technology that might just blow them all away for sheer visual pop. It’s all about searing brightness and even deeper blacks. It’s about dramatically increasing the numbers of colors a monitor can display. And it’s coming soon to a PC near you. Get ready for HDR, people.

The basic concept of HDR (high dynamic range) is simple. It means stretching out the extremes of display capability—delivering more, even when that means less. But it’s hard to point at any one feature and say, “This is HDR.” Nor is it easy to define in terms of numbers. There is no one metric that definitively determines what an HDR display is. Instead, there’s a number of standards that are competing to become the de facto definition of HDR.

This is going to cause confusion. Some monitor makers are likely to play a little fast and loose with how screens are marketed. Distinguishing between what you might call a full HDR feature set and its constituent parts, such as wider color gamuts, is going to be a challenge both for marketeers and consumers. It’s even tricky to define in terms of where it lies in the display chain. Game developers have talked about HDR rendering for years. But no games have output HDR visuals, and there were no displays to support that.

Nevertheless, HDR technology is rapidly becoming the norm in the HDTV market, and it’s coming to the PC. So here’s all you need to know.

What, exactly, constitutes an HDR display? Or should that be an HDR-10 display? Or maybe UHD Premium? Hang on, what about Rec. 2020? And BT.2100, SMPTE 2084, 12bit color, and wide gamuts?