SDR literally has fewer brightness bits. You can tonemap with the darkest in a scene pulled to zero and the brightest to 1, but, this is not usually what the color grader intended so usually isn’t done automatically. And when you do this, you end up with gaps in the middle (like 18-bit color). So usually, a range “in the middle” is reserved for SDR, and the extra two (or four, or six) bits of brightness in HDR allow you to pull it darker or brighter.

thanks for your insights. my comment was overly cynical. in practice though visually , on a good (really good) monitor, you really can not see a difference. trained eyes, cannot really see a real difference. the difference becomes visible more due to a monitors own quircks not displaying accurately (mapping of this sdr/hdr to colourspace).

this was posted before here on HN and i dont think its wrong. though ofcourse, technically, there are differences, which might be in some applicaitons ( but usually are not) exploited to the viewers benefit. (?? maybe?? someone with real good eyes :)) https://yedlin.net/DebunkingHDR/index.html

maybe my interpretation is wrong, but i dont think it is far off if it is. specification differences and differences in human perception are not the same thing

Would you say 8 bit audio can express the same audio quality as 16 bit audio?

It is weird, though, that they're different modes and you have to choose on both the device and the software which to use.

Imagine if every individual song, speaker/earbud, and MP3 player had a different implementation of 8/16 bit music, and it was up to you to compare/contrast the 8 variations to decide if 8 or 16 bits was more auditorially satisfying.

You get this with like levels and mixers, but not with such a fundamental quality as definition. Sure, you can chase hi-fi, but I feel like music has less artificial upscaling and usually hi-fi is a different product, not a toggle buried in various menus.

I don't know, it's kind of crazy.

It’s the transport. Imagine if the D/A was in the speaker; you might set params differently then.

We kind of did have an equivalent situation back in the day - you used to have A-law vs μ-law

Super Audio CD used 1 bit audio (at a very high sample rate) and sounded just fine

32 bit audio is higher resolution, it can have effects applied to it in higher detail. like subpixel coordinates might more clearly specify a pixels colours...

anything beyond 16bit (which is streamed to your speakers) is not audible though in the sense of playing it to the speaker. it matters in processing (dsp). (44 or 48khz inguess?)