Can anyone explain what is going on with my two Samsung screens and HDR? My issues is that depending on the game HDR either looks great or it looks very dull in areas that don't use the extremes of HDR's brightness and contrast capability.
The screens I have are:
- Samsung KS8000 - 65" 4K TV
- Samsung CRG9 - 49" 5120x1440 super ultrawide monitor
Both are edge lit VA panels with not many dimming zones. YouTube videos look great in HDR on both.
I've tried games with both my PS4 Pro and my PC (2080 Ti as GPU, Win 1903 with HDR setting enabled) just to rule out the platform itself.
Gears 5 (PC) and God of War 2018 (PS4) both look fantastic to me, but I tried for example Shadow of the Tomb Raider on both platforms and displays and the end result was the same: Good when in brighter areas and bad when in darker ones. For example the day of the dead party scene in the start has what seems like a gray haze over it compared to just running the game in SDR where it has more contrast and deeper blacks. Overall SDR has more depth to its colors to me, which you could of course call oversaturated or overcontrasted if you want but in any case there is a marked difference. I experience a similar issue in RDR2 with the updated HDR patch for example but I don't think I pushed its settings other than turning on the Game mode HDR.
Is this an issue with the fact that both my displays are very limited in their local dimming capability? Why does this vary by game? Shouldn't content that is closer to SDR still look similar to the SDR mode?