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by Derbasti 1559 days ago
It's not the the camera that lacks dynamic range. It's your screen.

There's a fundamental problem with photography: a scene can contain up to 20 EV of dynamic range. Your camera can capture up to 14 EV. But your screen or a print can only depict 5-10 EV.

So something has to give. The camera capture is usually fine, only excluding the brightest highlights like the sun itself, and the darkest shadows, both of which we don't expect to contain detail anyway. But mapping the rest into the (let's say) 8 EV of available dynamic range of the screen is a problem.

Film does it in two ways: it rolls of highlights and shadows smoothly, preserving mid-tone contrast while compressing (and desaturating) extreme tones. Secondly, chemical diffusion enhances local contrast, while reducing global contrast, a bit like the "clarity" slider in Lightroom.

Smart phone cameras do something similar, with HDR image fusion, local contrast, and tone mapping.

Which is why, ultimately, only an edited picture can represent the experience of viewing a natural scene. The full tonal range of the scene can not be displayed. We have to rely on a somewhat artificial compressed rendition instead. But that's not a fault of the camera, or even the screen. But simply the result of showing an emissive reality on an (assumed) reflective medium. To me, it's the same perceptual unreality as projecting a 3D scene onto a 2D medium.

To me, it's what makes photography (and visual arts in general) interesting. They don't show reality, but a depiction of reality. And in that crop, project, compress, lies interpretation and expression.
1 comments
ElephantsMyAnus 1559 days ago
No that can't be what's happening. You would expect contrast to be lost, not increased, if that was the issue.

8bit sRGB can contain 11.6 f-stops of dynamic range, and it is no longer enough for modern screens. There must be a longstanding bug somewhere. It would not be the first time it happened. There was a chroma decoding bug in almost all DVD players. A very similar issue to this, antialiasing in CGI used to be calculated without gamma, until GPUs got fast enough to use it and I suppose that someone started looking into why it performs worse than expected.

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