Completely disagree.

Even setting gaming aside, I've started taking family/fun photos in HDR instead of JPEG, and on things that can render them (like smartphones and TVs), they are gorgeous. I can't imagine going back now.

I took this on a walk this week, completely unedited:

If your browser doesn't render that, here's my best attempt at an AVIF conversion:

And JPEG-XL:

On my iPhone or a TV, the sun is so bright it makes you squint, and as yellow-orange as real life. The bridge in shadow is dark but clear. It looks just like I'm standing there, with my eyes adjusting to different parts of the picture.

I love this! It feels like a cold, cozy memory.

Now if I crush it down to an SDR JPEG:

It just doesn't* look* right. The sun is a paper-white blob, and washed out. And while this is technically not the fault of encoding it as SDR, simply being an 8 bit JPEG crushed all the shadows into blocky grey blobs.

...This is the kicker with HDR. It's not that it doesn't look incredible. But the software/display support is just not there.

I bet most browsers viewing this post aren't rendering those images right, if at all.

Lemmy, a brand new platform, doesn't even support JXL, HEIF, or AVIF! It doesn't support any HDR format at all; I had to embed them from catbox.