Comment by dperfect
It's hard to boil it down to a simple thesis because the problem is complicated. He admits this in the presentation and points to it being part of the problem itself; there are so many technical details that have been met with marketing confusion and misunderstanding that it's almost impossible to adequately explain the problem in a concise way. Here's my takeaway:
- It was clearly a mistake to define HDR transfer functions using absolute luminance values. That mistake has created a cascade of additional problems
- HDR is not what it was marketed to be: it's not superior in many of the ways people think it is, and in some ways (like efficiency) it's actually worse than SDR
- The fundamental problems with HDR formats have resulted in more problems: proprietary formats like Dolby Vision attempting to patch over some of the issues (while being more closed and expensive, yet failing to fully solve the problem), consumer devices that are forced to render things worse than they might be in SDR due to the fact that it's literally impossible to implement the spec 100% (they have to make assumptions that can be very wrong), endless issues with format conversions leading to inaccurate color representation and/or color banding, and lower quality streaming at given bit rates due to HDR's reliance on higher bit depths to achieve the same tonal gradation as SDR
- Not only is this a problem for content delivery, but it's also challenging in the content creation phase as filmmakers and studios sometimes misunderstand the technology, changing their process for HDR in a way that makes the situation worse
Being somewhat of a film nerd myself and dealing with a lot of this first-hand, I completely agree with the overall sentiment and really hope it can get sorted out in the future with a more pragmatic solution that gives filmmakers the freedom to use modern displays more effectively, while not pretending that they should have control over things like the absolute brightness of a person's TV (when they have no idea what environment it might be in).
While HDR has the problems described by you, in practice, whenever possible, I choose the HDR version of a movie over its SDR version.
The reason is not HDR itself, but the fact that the HDR movies normally use the BT.2020 color space, while the SDR movies normally use the BT.709 color space.
The color spaces based on the limitations of the first color CRT tubes, which are no longer relevant today, i.e. sRGB, BT.709 and the like, are really unacceptable from my point of view, because they cannot reproduce many of the more saturated colors in the red-orange region, which are frequently encountered in nature and in manufactured objects, and which are also located in a region of the color space where human vision is most sensitive.
While no cheap monitor can reproduce the full BT.2020, many cheap monitors can reproduce the full DCI-P3 color space, which provides adequate improvements in the red-orange corner over sRGB/BT.709.