A 5k nit display is going to blast the hell out of peoples' eyes. Completely overgunned for any normal person. Also, what's the power draw at such a light output level; a kilowatt? Ugh, no.
High-powered quantum-dot LCD screens are already way too bright IMO; my Apple Thunderbolt is specced at like 350-400nit IIRC, and at max brightness you don't want to be looking straight at it for any period of time. Samsung has a quantum dot TV specced at 1000 nits or thereabout I believe; jesus. That'd be horrible to look at indoors in room lighting.
While I agree the main use case is games, videos and photos (i.e. trying to get closer to reproducing real world brightness/contrast), desktop tasks could also benefit somewhat from a larger range. For various historical reasons, UI designers (or those who had to fill that role without proper training) often end up using close to maximum brightness of LDR ("white") as a background colour filling most of the screen. Unfortunately that means all the actual content must be darker and you lose the ability to actually highlight something on it.Currently, you set a monitor to a certain brightness to make sure that typical desktop tasks (browsing the net, editing documents, etc.) are comfortable for extended periods of time. But that also limits the maximum brightness that can be displayed during a game or video playback. With an HDR display you still configure your display for extended comfortable usage, but it allows it to exceed that if the content calls for it.
5k nits maximum brightness is not a problem. Bright highlight areas tend to be small, such as specular reflections on metal edges. Eyes handle this case just fine. If you accidentally look at the sun or a big mirror like surface reflecting the sun, it should look uncomfortably bright. You automatically close your eyes in this case, just like you do with the real sun. Eyes adapt pretty fast to bright light (but much slower to darkness). However 5k nits is nowhere close to displaying the brightness of the real sun or even a white surface in direct daylight. A small sun disk on the screen at 5k nits wouldn't be bright enough to cause the same reaction as accidentally looking at the real sun.A constant powerful glare is better for the eye than a sudden burst of enormous brightness, because your pupils are slow to react. So a 5k nit display would indeed blast the hell out of your eyes, especially if it suddenly zaps all of it into your retinas without prior warning!
How do you show off superbright capabilities of your game engine on HDR monitors? By pumping the brightness in a not terribly subtle manner, I'm thinking.
How do you show off superbright capabilities of your game engine on HDR monitors? By pumping the brightness in a not terribly subtle manner, I'm thinking.