cfx
Student Council President
This seems heavily dependent on the player being used. The Panasonic UB420 I have seems to do a reasonable job with only a change to a single setting that I guess affects the overall range of luminance of the image, as it seems to take care of that issue. In its default setting at least with my display it's very dark with a lot of detail lost. I've done some comparisons with 4K discs that come with a Blu-ray of the same master, and I can make the two look roughly equivalent.
OTOH, I tried a Sony X700 player, and I got poor results with it. The Panasonic has something they call the "HDR Optimizer" which has further adjustments, but I didn't use any of that in my testing.
I'm sure the results aren't completely ideal, but I've only bought 4K discs where there either is no Blu-ray at all, or it's some very old master that's unacceptable quality, so given the alternatives it's an acceptable tradeoff.
What I find annoying is some companies when they make a new Blu-ray to match a 4K disc, rather than creating a master from before the HDR was applied to the master, they are also just converting the HDR master back to SDR, and apparently via a completely automated process in some cases, with often significant black crush, or alternately things that should be pretty dark being overly lit.
Tangential rant: Online, especially on video-centric forums, mention anything about doing this or just looking at screen caps that are HDR converted to SDR, and there's always a chorus of "You're not seeing it as intended or like you'll see it on a proper HDR display!!!" I'll accept that, in theory at least. In practice, few if any consumer TVs support the nit specs a lot of HDR is mastered at, and those TVs do their own tone mapping to convert that HDR into what the particular display can show. How is that any different than HDR to SDR conversion, aside from potentially not having to be quite as extreme of a conversion?
My apparently controversial opinion is that HDR is revisionist BS and is not what films ever looked like in theaters, where projectors were something like 100-200 nits (I don't remember exactly, but it is pretty low). If 4K discs were just an increase in resolution and the improved color gamut I wouldn't object to the format. It's HDR I do not like out of principle.
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