Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Actually, I think it means the cult of colorists who are using antiquated 80-120 nit reference modes designed for CRTs in the 1980s and 1990s and who sit in literal dark rooms with 5 nit lighting need to
 
And my screen is not 1000 nits – it is capped at 500 – which is the point of this thread.
 
It’s amazing to me how many people use their Mac with turned down brightness. I never ever have mine lower than 100% (any screen I own actually) except for my phone in bed while I’m easing myself to sleep.

Mac screen 100%. I could use about 20% more SDR brightness and be happy.
 
Except I can't watch them, because MY SCREEN IS TOO DARK – I appreciate the industry and experts in the field, but real-world brightness levels and/or outdoor viewing is important for the end user
 
btw, 1000 nits sounds like a lot brighter than 500 nits - but not really. Brightness perception follows a power law - 1000 nits is perceived as only about 30% brighter than 500 nits.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/perceived-brightness

However, 1000 nits will consume around 100% more power (=heat) than 500 nits.

It is just a limitation of LCD/OLED, that it cannot compete with outside brightness from the sun, which is many orders of magnitude brighter.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: bill-p

Outdoor Light Levels​

Common outdoor light levels at day and night:
ConditionIllumination
(ftcd)(nit)
Sunlight34226.907131684459538
Full Daylight3422.4678962481173
Overcast Day342.183127647574972
Very Dark Day34.059157821665602
Twilight3.437746770784939
Deep Twilight0.343774677078494
Full Moon0.034377467707849
Quarter Moon0.003437746770785
Starlight0.000350140874802
Overcast Night0.000031830988618
 
Just going outside on a sunny day is equivalent to 3422 nits. You must have really sensitive eyes if you think 1000 nits from a computer screen is some type of health hazard.
 
This is simply not true. HDR content simply allows for a wider range of color values to be displayed all at once, but there is no stopping your white value from getting brighter.


^ if you are on a new MacBook, going to that page will show text that is white... and far brighter than the white that's currently on the display (even if the display is at max brightness). That's how you get white that is "whiter".



Nits measurement is still comparable between a 16-inch screen vs a 6-inch screen. Nit as a unit means candelas per meter squared. It is independent of display size.

What's fun and shows that color images will indeed be overexposed is if you right click and inspect element on the whiter text and change it to an emoji or something, the result is super overexposed. You can change the <p id="tester"> to <div id="tester"> and then toss an <img src="URL here"> in the div with the image URL of your choice and it'll attempt to display the image at the crazy high brightness. All are overexposed.

I still think it should be plausible to add a "daylight mode" at 600-700 nits to help with outdoor visibility just like there's night shift for nighttime viewing. The display is clearly capable, it would just need to be set up correctly to map white to a brighter value.
 
Last edited:
What's fun and shows that color images will indeed be overexposed is if you right click and inspect element on the whiter text and change it to an emoji or something, the result is super overexposed. You can change the <p id="tester"> to <div id="tester"> and then toss an <img src="URL here"> in the div with the image URL of your choice and it'll attempt to display the image at the crazy high brightness. All are overexposed.

I still think it should be plausible to add a "daylight mode" at 600-700 nits to help with outdoor visibility just like there's night shift for nighttime viewing. The display is clearly capable, it would just need to be set up correctly to map white to a brighter value.

That's because the page doesn't exploit HDR. It exploits EDR, Extended Dynamic Range, which works simply by pushing Gamma values linearly to absolute max and does indeed cause clipping. It does not care or worry about anything other than absolute white gamma. This is also why it's misleading to use this same source code to display anything other than white and say that those other things are clipping because of poor color profile mapping. That is not true. Safari is content-aware and can map sRGB vs DCI-P3 properly for instance.

Pushing gamma is the trick Apple has employed for years to make Mac displays brighter. It is not without flaws, though. See here:

It's not very interesting to end user ultimately, though. What end user needs to know is:

1. Apple has full control over the display and EDR used to make sense for displays that could not physically display brighter brightness. But it does not make sense for the new MacBook, which can physically display brighter brightness values than whatever the max SDR value is.

2. Currently the 500 nits limit in SDR is artificial rather than absolute. The hardware device (the display) is absolutely capable of even brighter values.

3. Sure, some professionals want to mention their working environments and low nits. I do concede this is valid but... again, these nits values are dependent on the viewing environment. It is extremely misleading to say that these are absolute values. Anyone claiming to be "professionals" viewing displays at 80-120 nits all the time in any viewing environment do NOT understand what they are talking about AT ALL. I don't care how many years of expertise you have in the industry. The FACT is that there are technical limitations only engineers can understand and colorists ARE NOT engineers.

So it is plausible to use >500 nits of brightness for any of the new MacBooks by "hacking" the system into thinking everything is HDR. The reason it hasn't been done already is because many developers think Apple can very easily flip this switch in the next update, and it is absolutely pointless to try and hack the system when Apple can change it at any random time. It doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty of achieving the task.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: Vlad Soare
Last edited:
It’s amazing to me how many people use their Mac with turned down brightness. I never ever have mine lower than 100% (any screen I own actually) except for my phone in bed while I’m easing myself to sleep.

Mac screen 100%. I could use about 20% more SDR brightness and be happy.
My office has three large windows and faces southwest. 500 nits is not bright enough for working on sunny afternoons. I would love a 1000 nit SDR monitor!

I work mostly with text and scientific figures, so color accuracy is not essential for my work. I just need more brightness!
 
  • Like
Reactions: JohnHerzog
1000-nit would be great. The iPhone display is geared more towards this 'real-world' functionality
 
I don't know, man. Because I've seen threads from 2012 trying to figure out the same thing. Although, it is definitely possible for Apple to issue an update and for the OS the be amended to include a higher brightness limit. Apple did this for the Airs a while back.

Well, so... we can either force the system into constantly playing a transparent HDR video over the entire display all the time and then make it so that all gamma values are pushed... which then really makes the system very slow especially at higher display resolution.

...or we can wait for Apple to flip a switch in the firmware to allow brightness values to reach more than 500.

Personally, I believe the latter is what we want. If enough pressure comes down, Apple will make the change eventually. It may not be this year, but it doesn't matter. There is no MacBook with a display brighter than yours in existence anyway.
 
It has to do with power consumption optimization. Apple has been stating battery life hours as an advertising metric and due to the law of power, to garner even just a 30% perceived brightness improvement there would be doubling of power consumption. Apple is trapped in a perpetual metric improvement state and the law of diminishing returns with respect to screen brightness is too expensive to justify.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.