I will say that it is really annoying to have an HDR video just be way brighter for no reason, and I kind of hate HDR for this and this alone.
[0] This is also why streaming services have shows that are WAY TOO DAMNED DARK. Related: the people mastering the audio have also decided to make all the dialogue way too low because fuck people with hearing disabilities[1].
[1] An audio engineer was asked about this and he outright said he doesn't master for substandard audio setups. No I don't remember the source, it was from one of those articles that show up on the Firefox new tab page. Yes I am kind of reading into things and getting angry about it.
It was Christopher Nolan. He said
"The only platform I’m interested in talking about is theatrical exhibition."
and
"“We made the decision a couple of films ago that we weren’t going to mix films for substandard theaters... We’re mixing for well-aligned, great theaters... At a certain point, you have to decide if you’ve made the best possible version of the film and you’re trying to account for inadequacies in presentation... That’s chasing the tail. It doesn’t work. I will say, with our sound mixes, we spent a lot of time and attention making sure that they work in as predictable a way possible."
https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/christopher-nolan...
https://www.indiewire.com/features/craft/dunkirk-too-loud-ch...
Doesn’t that happen because shows are mastered for 5.1 systems and the dialogs are put in the centre channel, whereas most of us are watching in stereo with poorly setup automatic remixing?
But if you do want to "use the full potential of your hardware", there was some third-party app that used private APIs to set the screen brightness above that limit. I don't remember its name.
So if they they just mapped the new brightness everything, everywhere, would look wrong. And people would complain that the iPhone is broken. And they have to redo all their websites/apps. And when they do, they look wrong on every other device.
This is the only sane way. It has to be something people opt-in to. That’s what Apple did.
The difference is while most things support sRGB, those other color spaces may just be outside what the display can handle. My Ultrafine 5k for instance does not show a discernible difference between the two QR codes.
You also have the issue that static images displayed at higher brightness will use more power and require quicker mitigations to prevent burn-in, so an 'ultra white' background may just not be something supported for a web page.
