That's correct. I can't use it at all with my Apple TV or Playstation 5, because the screen immediately goes dark. I don't know how to describe this exactly, but say that the TV's regular RGB display goes from 1 to 100. I'd expect that HDR would make it go from -50 to 150, or something like that. Instead, on my Samsung, it goes from -50 to 50. No amount of control fiddling can make it get as bright as it does in non-HDR mode.

Our cheaper LG works beautifully with the same inputs. The Samsung? Nope. Everything looks like the finale of Game of Thrones, even when you're looking at a soccer game played on a sunny day at noon on the equator.

> I'd expect that HDR would make it go from -50 to 150

That's not how HDR works. It expands the high range exclusively. So more like 0 to 1000 instead of 0 to 100.

You're right about how HDR should work. I'm reporting how my Samsung TV does work. It's terrible, and clearly a bug. There are many, many forum posts about "samsung hdr dark", often with random advice about adjusting the gamma, etc., that sounds like it should work but only helps a little bit.

Your approximation isn't really better than theirs.

It's true that you can't go below black, but SDR has extremely bad precision below 1 nit. HDR can accurately represent scenes at least 100x darker than SDR, in addition to bright spots at least 100x brighter. https://2.img-dpreview.com/files/p/TS940x940~forums/66687985...

Yeah - they support HDR10 (the most common HDR), HDR10+ (adds per-scene tone-mapping, but is rare to see media for), but not Dolby Vision (which requires paying a license fee to the Dolby folks).

I've heard that Netflix has added HDR10+ streams recently, but I haven't verified that myself.