alt Hacker NewsThis! Yes I think you’re absolutely right. The term “HDR” is in part kind of an artifact of how digital image formats evolved, and it kind of only makes sense relative to a time when the most popular image formats and most common displays were not very sophisticated about colors.
That said, there is one important part that is often lost. One of the ideas behind HDR, sometimes, is to capture absolute values in physical units, rather than relative brightness. This is the distinguishing factor that film and paper and TVs don’t have. Some new displays are getting absolute brightness features, but historically most media display relative color values.
Absolute is also a funny size. From the perspective of human visual perception, an absolute brightness only matters if the entire viewing environment is also controlled to the same absolute values. Visual perception is highly contextual, and we are not only seeing the screen.
It's not fun being unable to watch dark scenes during the day or evening in a living room, nor is vaporizing your retinas if the ambient environment went dark in the meantime. People want good viewing experience in the available environment that is logically similar to what the content intended, but that is not always the same as reproducing the exact same photons as the directors's mastering monitor sent towards their their eyeballs at the time of production.