6 Reasons You Re Not Enjoying True Hdr Even With An Hdr Rated Monitor

HDR promises a bigger color gamut, brighter visuals, and more than a billion colors, resulting in more vibrant and color-accurate images.

However, many people fail to enjoy true HDR even with their newly bought display—so here are six reasons you are not enjoying true HDR even with an HDR-rated monitor.

1. You’re Not Using the Correct ICC Profile

Figuring out the best On Screen Display (OSD) setting can do wonders for your monitor. However, OSD settings can only do so much in properly calibrating your display’s accuracy.

To better calibrate your monitor’s display, you can use what is known as an ICC (International Color Consortium) or ICM (Image Color Matching) profile. These profiles can be used through the color management systems of Windows and macOS.

Although you can manually calibrate your monitor through the color management system and various online color calibration tools, it’s hard to make accurate results as you’ll be eye-balling an uncalibrated display.

Good thing reputable manufacturers provide ICC profiles for their monitors. These profiles can be found on the CD that came with your monitor or a QR code displayed on the box or manual. If you can’t find a CD or QR code to scan, you can search for the correct color calibration online.

Although manufacturer ICC profiles should be your first option, sometimes even monitors with the same model number will perform differently. To ensure you get the best ICC profile, you may also want to try third-party ICC profiles made by other people. Two of the most popular sites to look for ICC profiles are RTINGS and TFTCentral.

ICC profiles are great tools for setting up your monitor if you don’t have the hardware or the knowledge to calibrate a monitor properly. They are basically presets copied from an already calibrated monitor that you can use with your specific monitor. So if you haven’t used an ICC profile before, you might want to try out a couple of them now.

2. Your Monitor Isn’t Capable

Not all HDR monitors have the same capabilities. A proper HDR-rated monitor will have a peak brightness of 400-4000nits, a color depth of 10-12 bits, and support the rec 2020 color gamut. The difference between the lower and the higher ends of HDR monitors are huge, and that doesn’t even account for LED technology, resolution, and other variables.

Since advertising constantly shows top-end HDR technology, you might be disappointed if you buy a budget HDR panel. Still, as long as it passes the minimum specs of HDR, you’ll find significantly better images than a regular SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) monitor.

The real problem is if your monitor isn’t even capable of the minimum HDR specifications, which is common for cheaper monitors. People need to be aware that companies can slap the HDR logo on their products as long as their monitor can somehow incorporate the use of HDR technology with their product.

This results in specifications such as “HDR Ready” and “HDR10 Compatible,” which basically means that the monitor has the software to process HDR content—but not the hardware to show it.

Since true HDR hardware is pretty expensive, if you’ve bought the cheapest HDR monitor on the market, you may be disappointed to know that your monitor might not have the hardware capabilities to display HDR content.

3. You’re Not Viewing HDR Content

HDR10 is the most popular HDR standard. If your monitor doesn’t specify otherwise, it is likely using HDR10. HDR10 uses static metadata of the content you’re watching to display images properly. This metadata is created during the color correction and color grading of the movie, video, game, or image.

The problem is that a vast majority of content ever created has been post-processed using SDR. This means that even if you view SDR content on your HDR-capable monitor, you’d still be viewing SDR-quality visuals.

Even if you’re using a monitor capable of HDR10+ or Dolby Vision, without HDR content, the best thing your monitor could do is algorithmically expose the blacks and whites of the SDR content. Which sometimes could lead to weird visuals such as reduced contrasts during high-contrast scenes and supposedly white areas looking gray.

4. HDR Isn’t Enabled

There are several reasons why HDR isn’t enabled in your system. First, many assume HDR is automatically activated when they hook their HDR monitor to their system. Although auto-HDR is now available for newer devices, you might be using an older system without auto-HDR functionality.

If you’re still using Windows 10, you might want to check if HDR is enabled. Unlike Windows 11, which has an auto HDR feature, Windows 10 and other legacy Windows versions do not have the auto HDR feature.

If you’re using a MacBook, you may also want to check if HDR is enabled whenever you’re using it unplugged and relying on its battery. Although MacBooks do support auto HDR, if you’re on Energy Saver, HDR will automatically be turned off to save some power.

As for Linux distributions, unfortunately, popular distros like Ubuntu, Red Hat, Linux Mint, and Pop! _OS currently don’t support HDR. However, talks in the community confirm that Red Hat is in the process of developing HDR support for its distribution. You may want to switch to Windows for the time being until Red Hat finally starts supporting HDR.

5. Your Graphics Card Doesn’t Support HDR

Another reason you’re not seeing the real benefits of your HDR-capable monitor is that your graphics cards and drivers are old. HDR has been around for several years already, so you’ll likely have no problems with your graphics card. But if you’re using an older PC, say from 2013, to act as an entertainment system, then it is likely that its CPU and GPU do not support HDR.

To meet the bare minimum requirements, you’ll at least need a GPU from NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX900 or AMD’s Radeon RX400 lineup of GPUs. If you don’t have a GPU, you can still have HDR support using the integrated graphics from at least a 7th-Generation Intel Core Processor.

6. You’re Using the Wrong Cables

With HDR presenting exponentially more colors, more data is needed to display each specific color properly. This would require additional bandwidth on top of the usual bandwidth you use on a regular display. In addition, since most HDR monitors today also offer 4K resolution at 60Hz, you’ll need a cable fast enough to transfer all the incoming data.

Two of the most popular cables used today are HDMI and DisplayPort. Both have strengths and weaknesses but ultimately support HDR viewing. HDMI started supporting HDR with HMDI version 1.4, while DisplayPort started support with DisplayPort version 1.4. For future proofing, you may also want to consider getting the latest version of the ports.

Troubleshooting Your HDR Issues

If you’ve recently bought an HDR monitor and feel that HDR’s improvements are lacking or indiscernible from regular SDR, you’re probably not enjoying true HDR. The difference between HDR and SDR’s color gamut, peak brightness, and color depth is so exponential that vibrancy, exposure, and brightness improvements should be quite noticeable.

So, if you feel like HDR is lacking in any way, the list above can act as a checklist for you to troubleshoot and hopefully fix the problems that may be causing you to not enjoy HDR to its fullest.