The problem of the low contrast issue is that otherwise content becomes unusuable on calibrated screens.
On a modern screen, a value of 100% is 1000 nits, 0% is far below 1 nits.
On an average shitty monitor, it's more a range 10 times more limited.
Your suggestion of making my monitor emulate your shitty monitor in hardware settings would also make it impossible to use it for use cases that do need this high contrast.
Reading text, on the other hand, gets very painful with that much contrast.
Real text, on a real newspaper, in normal room light, is #454545 text on #f0f0f0 background, in sRGB color space. Not #000 on #fff in sRGB, and definitely not 0 on max on ten times more contrast.
The real issue is that we have no color and contrast management at all for websites. I can't say that a color is meant to mean a certain brightness in nits, so it renders as #777 on my screen, and #000 on yours.
Gosh, I didn't realize my new MBP had such a bad screen.
Low-contrast UIs can work well in a typical office environment on bright screens.
Take your ideally calibrated monitor, and use it as a second screen while watching a movie in your darkened home theater. Now take it and use it outside on a sunny day.
I prefer to adjust the brightness. YMMV.
Your description of sRGB is incorrect. sRGB was specified for CRT screens in 1996, used in an ideal viewing environment that is very dimly lit ("The current proposal assumes an encoding ambient luminance level of 64 lux which is more representative of a dim room in viewing computer generated imagery... While we believe that the typical office or home viewing environment actually has an ambient luminance level around 200 lux, we found it impractical to attempt to account for the resulting large levels of flare that resulted" https://www.w3.org/Graphics/Color/sRGB.html)
That doesn't match my viewing environments, which include the range above.
MBP? That's surprising to hear then, they've got great (not $1600 Dell HDR monitor perfect, but great) monitors.
One of the core issues is constantly fiddling with the brightness, especially with multiple monitors.
That's where ideally you'd want to have the brightness of the panel fixed, and change it with a lookup map, e.g. what f.lux does for color mapping at night.
That's where you'd get ideal results, would be able to enjoy media in high quality without having trouble with too high contrast or too low contrast websites, and you could choose separate profiles for text and media.
Not everything supports this yet, but with the move to HDR10 and DolbyVision, support is getting better, because now people do have content in the same window that's mastered with completely different contrast ratios (the min for HDR10 is "moonless night", the max is "as bright as sunlight on a cloudless day", while for text the ideal min/max is newspaper text)
You'd have to adjust both brightness and white balance based on the environment (just like a camera. How well do professionals trust the camera's automatic choices?) and probably the environment behind the screen (the rest of the user's field of view).
And then you'd probably need to throw in an adjustment for the individual user's light sensitivity needs and preferences, and possibly the user's current eye dilation (did I just go from bright light into a dark room? Or did I just wake up in the dark room?)
You can design for an ideal environment, but realize that users will not always (ever?) be in that ideal.
Correct, but software then needs to be explicitly mapped with a brightness range.
Otherwise you can't have on the same screen a game simulating a dark night with low contrast, and a guide for that game which uses the full contrast spectrum.
Your suggestions all break if I want to be able to have at the same time extremely low contrast content and text on the same screen, next to another, and want both to look fine.
> With that scenario, you're dealing with physiological limitations, because if you have a bright region next to a dark night region, your eyes cannot perceive detail in the dark region.
Correct, that's why you meed a software solution that detects this issue and dynamically adapts.
This isn't complicated either, every modern video game has the issue of UI, text, and HDR content in one frame, and has well-working tonemap curves and dynamic exposure adaption algorithms.
Microsoft is also integrating solutions for this into Windows.
Any OS that plans to ever mix HDR and SDR content on one screen needs this anyway, and if you do that, you can also easily add minor changes to allow text content to be annotated so its contrast can also be dynamically adjusted.
On a modern screen, a value of 100% is 1000 nits, 0% is far below 1 nits.
On an average shitty monitor, it's more a range 10 times more limited.
Your suggestion of making my monitor emulate your shitty monitor in hardware settings would also make it impossible to use it for use cases that do need this high contrast.
Reading text, on the other hand, gets very painful with that much contrast.
Real text, on a real newspaper, in normal room light, is #454545 text on #f0f0f0 background, in sRGB color space. Not #000 on #fff in sRGB, and definitely not 0 on max on ten times more contrast.
The real issue is that we have no color and contrast management at all for websites. I can't say that a color is meant to mean a certain brightness in nits, so it renders as #777 on my screen, and #000 on yours.