Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, I suspect it’s because of blooming. This would explain why the iPad Pro goes to 600 nits for SDR.1.) Battery life
Limiting peak brightness in non-HDR scenarios is an easy way to ensure a longer average battery life. Much could be said about tradeoffs and design principles when deciding to force a limit like this. I'll skip that.
2.) HDR strategy tax
When you are trying to display SDR content on a display that can get very bright, there are 2 "technically correct" approaches: (A) limit the brightness of the SDR content to the SDR reference level (sRGB/Rec709), which is 80-120 nits depending on which spec you use, or (B) just scale the brightness to the display's max capabilities so pure white becomes 1000 nits or whatever the display is capable of.
TVs usually take approach B and make SDR content look as bright as possible. That's good for selling consumer TVs, but it makes HDR worse by comparison (since it can only get dimmer) and is not accurate for media editing/production.
HDR is a big part of Apple's hardware/software strategy – displays, cameras, codecs, color management, etc. It would really dilute the value of HDR if they upscaled SDR content so much that it's hard to distinguish from SDR. So it seems that they've arrived at a middle between approaches A and B. SDR content can be scaled up to 500 nits, but anything higher than that is reserved for HDR.
3.) Reserving headroom for burn-in compensation
The maximum brightness of every (back)light gets lower with each hour of usage – some types more quickly than other types. Any time there are separate backlights for different parts of the screen (local dimming zones or individual pixels), the parts of the screen that are used more often will have backlights that age more quickly, getting dimmer. That's what causes visual "burn-in" over time. That's true for OLED, plasma, mini-LED, micro-LED, and anything else with local dimming.
Apple's OLED displays have a peculiar advantage: Unlike other displays which use the same exact OLED panels, they never display any burn-in effects – even after extended tests. I believe that this is achieved in their proprietary display controller by initially underdriving the display (e.g. limiting to 50% of possible brightness), tracking the lifetime usage of each backlight (each OLED subpixel!), and compensating for each backlight's expected aging/burn-in by selectively boosting their power. And voila, they end up with a display that has equal brightness for its entire lifespan and exhibits no burn-in.
For that magic burn-in compensation to work, they would need to (usually) operate the display at a fraction of its maximum possible brightness, reserving the remaining brightness to later compensate for aging backlights. If this is indeed their approach to burn-in compensation and they've brought the same display controller tech to the mini-LED displays, that would be a good reason to limit the normal operation of the display to a fraction of its peak luminance.
I thought the reviews used a YouTube Test that is HDR so likely 1000-1600 nits and its still better than the iPad because of a better diffusor.Giving Apple the benefit of the doubt, I suspect it’s because of blooming. This would explain why the iPad Pro goes to 600 nits for SDR.
Both the 16” MBP and iPad have 10,000 LEDs, but the mac spreads them out over a larger area. I suspect the blooming would be more noticeable on the 16” at 600 nits than it is on the iPad.
Apple’s website doesn’t seem to specify how many LEDs the 14” has, only the 16”. I think it has less.
They say 1000 sustained and 1600 peak. I dont think sustained means that you should blast it 24/7 but would be great for certain scenarios.I thought the reason 1,000 nits peak brightness is only available with HDR is this:
On average, HDR content has about 3x the dynamic range of SDR (after all, that's what HDR means: High Dynamic Range). Let's assume the screen has the power supply and thermals to generate a certain average brightness. For that average brightness, you'll get much higher peak brightness with HDR than SDR. If Apple allowed 1,000 nits max brightness with SDR, the average brightness would be too high for the screen's thermals and/or power supply.
This was my thought. Even if it was physically possible I suspect it would be bad for the hardware.
So somebody who buys this machine for editing HDR content all day will damage their machine?This was my thought. Even if it was physically possible I suspect it would be bad for the hardware.
Take a look at this: https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/There has to be a way to do this…
Haha! Wow - now my whole computer feels dimTake a look at this: https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/
edit: macrumors seems to have some sort of link protection that 404s this link but it works if you copy and paste.
Considering tricks like this are possible, I can't imagine we're too far off from this being somewhat of a reality. Funny thing is if you inspect element and edit the HDR text you can replace it with an emoji, but the emoji appears extremely overexposed. I would imagine there's some work to be done on displaying SDR with the correct tone mapping at over 500 nits.
Works in Safari for me, but not ChromeTake a look at this: https://kidi.ng/wanna-see-a-whiter-white/
As someone who upgraded from a 2016 model the screen on my 16" MBP is a lot brighter than my previous model to the point that it hurts my eyes and I have to lower the brightness a lot more than the 2016 model. I'm not sure how much you brightness you need, or that will be useful.Okay, so as most of you are probably already aware, the new miniLED 14 and 16-inch MacBook pros can achieve an incredible 1,000 nits of fullscreen sustained brightness. The catch is that that‘s only available while HDR content is onscreen, which for most people is like 0.1% of the time.
When HDR content is not onscreen, you’re still limited to the same 500 nits, which goes all the way back to the 2016 models. As someone who always has my brightness maxed out and often finds it to still be insufficient, this is super disappointing to me. I thought we would at least get 600 like the miniLED iPad Pro has, which uses the same display technology from the same manufacturer. ._. I have both a 500 nit Mac and a 600 nit iPad Pro and believe me the difference is way more noticeable than you would expect.
Given that these are Macs and we have a much higher level of control over the system compared to something like an iPad, would it be theoretically possible to “hack” our way to higher fullscreen SDR brightness? If so I would love to just raise it to 600, and I’d happily take the battery hit. It seems like something that may be possible given that this is a simple artificial limitation, but I need someone with a deeper understanding of macOS to weigh in.
The brightness is still only 500 nits - the same as the 2016 models. Look at the technical specifications: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP749?locale=en_USAs someone who upgraded from a 2016 model the screen on my 16" MBP is a lot brighter than my previous model to the point that it hurts my eyes and I have to lower the brightness a lot more than the 2016 model. I'm not sure how much you brightness you need, or that will be useful.
It’s still quoted at 500, but it’s a bit brighter anyway, and people have demonstrated this in videos (I think like 40 nits brighter). I would still like to find a way to “unlock” higher SDR brightness if possible, though.The brightness is still only 500 nits - the same as the 2016 models. Look at the technical specifications: https://support.apple.com/kb/SP749?locale=en_US
I would prefer a brighter screen to battery life.
As someone who upgraded from a 2016 model the screen on my 16" MBP is a lot brighter than my previous model to the point that it hurts my eyes and I have to lower the brightness a lot more than the 2016 model. I'm not sure how much you brightness you need, or that will be useful.
I think with the next iteration of the Display there will be marked improvements that will certainly increase the competitiveness of the display vs. higher-priced, 'professional-grade' products. Although, I'm not sure the device will be utilized predominantly by consumers for this purpose but more so chiefly, as the gentleman in the video said, for content consumption and not content creation.Just clocked this on an HDTV youtube video, on the ProDisplay XDR, looks like you can crank the brightness all the way past 1500 nits on a 10% window - although it doesn't show how this was done (regular desktop, or with test HDR video)
These days, most of the configuration settings are stored in the read-only volume and as a normal user, you can't really edit those files...Ah, not too surprising. I wonder where the range values are stored. Maybe the display driver? Or in CoreGraphics? I may poke around to satisfy my curiosity...
These days, most of the configuration settings are stored in the read-only volume and as a normal user, you can't really edit those files...
Apple has really locked down macOS in recent versions and made it more and more difficult, if not impossible, for enthusiasts such as ourselves to dig through the OS and make unauthorized changes....