Episode: 4409
Title: HPR4409: H D R Ridiculous Monitor
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4409/hpr4409.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-26 00:22:35

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4409 for Thursday the 26th of June 2025.
Today's show is entitled HDR Ridiculous Monitor.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 22 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, the presenter discusses configuring monitor settings for development, emphasizing
HDR calibration and...
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host
Operator.
Today I'm going to follow the background noise here and opening my shades.
I'm going to be talking about monitors.
In particular, my experience over time with monitors and my recent purchase and where I sit in that space.
So, if you think about getting a new monitor or you want to know what it's like to have different types of monitors,
this is kind of going to be what that is.
So, I've never been a fan, particularly of dual monitors.
From the get-go, I know it was kind of a fad.
People had big monitors.
I always had a small monitor when I was doing work.
And even programming and things like that, I've always had kind of the smallest monitor.
I've learned to have a little bit bigger monitors just for gaming.
And I've never really bought a monitor for productive reasons.
It's always been just kind of whatever is laying around.
Now, my current employer probably has like two, 25-inch monitors, something like that.
And I'll use those to do stuff.
And it's dual monitors.
You want, you know, my mother-in-law had a better monitor than me.
That's kind of where this all started.
Went to her house and had this big white screen monitor.
And I said, that's not fair.
My mother-in-law can't have a better monitor than me.
So, naturally, I went out to search around and see what the landscape is for today for monitors.
And, you know, looking on slickdeals.net, kind of looked around and said, you know,
I don't want dual monitors. I don't want like necessarily a big giant monitor,
but I want a nice monitor that's bigger than the one I had, which was probably like a 27-inch.
And it was not TFT, but the IPS monitor.
So, moving from that, I know OLEDs, big thing, and they have different types of LED and whatever.
So, I looked on slickdeals and found this ridiculous Samsung 49-inch Odyssey G95C.
It's part of the G9 series.
DQHD 240Hz curved gaming monitor.
Now, this is open box. It's like tap price. It was like $6.46.
I think retail on it right now is like a graying on Amazon.
I don't think that's the actual price. It's probably more like, I probably say 1 or 200 bucks maybe.
I think you could probably get this monitor for open box used, whatever, for around the same price.
Now, it does have a single burnt pixel on the upper left.
I don't feel like bothering with all that and returning it to just, you know,
or have to deal with one single pixel that I can't even see out of my peripheral.
Now, this is a curved monitor. It's longer than my table.
My table is, I don't know how long my table is, but it's actually longer than my table.
And I had to move my PC to make it all fit.
Now, what I'll tell you is that there's, you know, kind of major concerns around posture when setting up a system like this.
When you do dual monitors, you don't want one monitor on the left and one on the right.
This should be directly in front of you as your primary monitor.
And your secondary monitor might be on your left side or your right side depending on which you favor.
And I would actually encourage you to, if you do have dual monitors to shift them.
If it's always on the left, set it up on the right and then kind of shift those every, you know, year, six months, whatever.
So you're not trained on always looking to the left and having that neck attention.
And it's similar to a thing called mouse shoulder where put your arms out in front of you and you'll start feeling the pressure and the pulling of your shoulder muscles and all that.
That's where my biggest concerns are is that that posture of pulling on my shoulders and doing getting the mouse shoulder and getting support from my elbows.
So I switch back and forth between having arm rest up and getting support from my arms and I'll have kind of the traditional posture.
Actually right now it's a little low. I would have the traditional posture of, you know, feet flat monitor as at the very top of the monitor is at your eye level.
And then everything else just sits in place where it's supposed to go.
Now I do have a split keyboard. It's a fancy freestyle to connect this.
It's super fancy, whatever ergonomic. Now I've been using it for a while and it's actually nice type of split keyboard because I can put my steering wheel in the middle.
But actually my steering wheel kind of causes some problems because it causes more of that losing some of that support for my arms and elbows.
So I have to make sure I'm basically, my chin is almost on the steering wheel when I'm doing stuff because I'll have the all the way up.
If I'm going to be working for a lot, that's my best, best ergonomic position.
And, you know, the key there is, you know, whatever works for you, whatever keeps the pain from subsiding.
You don't want to stand up too long, you don't want to sit down too long.
But like I basically pull it up to my neck and then I push my keyboard and mouse forward, almost under, pretty much under the monitor.
And my arms, my forearms rest on the surface almost at shoulder level, a little bit lower than shoulder level.
And that's where I'm comfortable a lot of the times.
So I've moved that up right now and I'm semi comfortable.
I do have a pillow for my left hand because I have some kind of issues with my nerves being pinched on my elbow.
So I have some kind of issues in that space, so I don't know.
But anyways, that's about the kind of the screen position.
And getting this monitor, I've liked it so far.
I like the single monitor approach and I have to get used to the zoning.
You can use tools like power tools to do some of that stuff for power toys.
Now I don't, I didn't have to change any of the default things.
So I'm just using the big, big middle and then two small slices on the side.
So right now I have audio on the left, I have the browser in the middle and then I have the HPR notes on the right side here.
Now we'll say, you know, most people, when you think of screens, you think of like a 16 by 9 aspect ratio, which is like a wide screen.
Your traditional monitors are like a four by three looks like.
So old school monitors are going to be like a four by three.
Most of your monitors now are going to be 16 by nine.
Then you have a wide screen, which is I guess 21 by nine.
And then this is a 32 by nine.
So it's ridiculous.
I've got it probably two feet away or more.
Something like that.
It's very immersive.
You get like basically FOV without having FOV.
And you can even add FOV to the FOV and get ridiculous FOV like almost 360 FOV if you turn FOV up.
So on games like Minecraft or something, I can turn up that FOV all the way.
You can see everything around me.
It's pretty crazy.
So anyways.
Mainly got it for sim racing and kind of gaming to just treat myself.
I've never been one for monitors.
I actually purchased a ridiculous video card way back when the first kind of shortage of video cards was prevalent.
I got one on a deal and I ended up saving like $100 or $200 or something on a fancy video card.
But I had this crappy monitor from 150-volume monitor from Sam's Club or from Costco.
And after about a year or two, I finally switched.
And to a IPS.
And that was like a game changer.
It looked completely different.
And I'll say the same thing for this.
Going from IPS to this OLED or QDQHD.
They take more power. They're hotter.
But they're supposed to be like the best gaming monitors.
That's all subjective.
But this is a huge monitor.
It's ultra wide.
It's curved.
And it's supposed to be super fancy.
Now, when I started messing with this, I used the display port because that's supposedly faster.
That'll support faster.
I always thought HDMI is HDMI is HDMI, but display port supports faster speeds.
Up to like, you know, whatever.
And I'm doing it 200.
Was it right now 240 hertz or something?
Now, they usually tell you, supposed to tell you on the screen here.
Yeah, 240 hertz.
And the original issues I had with this monitor is that it would go to sleep and not wake back up.
And I think what's possibly caused some of that, fix some of that issue is setting up a virtual monitor.
And I have that notes, show notes, and show notes.
It's called a virtual monitor for display port connections.
So when you turn off your monitor, it essentially disappears from the system.
When you turn it off, I think it even makes the bedoop sound of it being unplugged.
So like, it doesn't exist.
When you turn it off, your monitor does not exist.
Where in an HDMI world, I think as long as there's something plugged in there, it stays alive.
But with this setup on Windows 11, once I turn that monitor off, it's gone.
And there's nothing for me to remote into.
It's the same kind of situation you have, like with Linux systems, where, like, if you're trying to out RDP or sorry, remote into a Linux system,
and there's no display to attach to, and you haven't defined a display to attach to, and there's not plugged into a monitor.
There's nothing you have to create a display to virtual display to, like, display stuff.
Same kind of thing with Windows.
I think once you, you know, unplug this monitor or turn it off, it doesn't exist anymore.
So I'd install a virtual GitHub virtual display port thing.
And that runs all the time.
And that fixed my issues.
Now, RDP would work fine.
But I don't necessarily like RDP, and it gives me limitations, like if I log in, I can't.
Once I log in, it doesn't really help with people on the actual system.
So I'll let my kid use my system to play games.
And I have to log in through VNC instead of RDP, because if I log in through RDP, screws everything up.
So that's one piece of it.
So a virtual display will help with remote connections, like VNC and RDP.
And then there's these HDR profiles, which I started out with.
And I eventually, oh man, it's catching poison.
I eventually landed on my own, doing my own tuning through the Windows HDR calibration.
And that's in the Windows store.
But just manually doing it.
And then also the games have sometimes HDR in calibration.
So if you've ever played a game, it says adjust the brightness to whatever.
If that's like a three or two step process, you're actually setting up the HDR calibration inside of the game itself.
So, and there's like different kinds of HDR.
There's Windows HDR.
It's like auto HDR.
There's like flex or something, a kit, something kit.
There's a bunch of them out there.
I just let Windows do its thing and video do its thing.
So I have the auto HDR on.
And once that worked, and I was able to get the HDR to actually push to at least one game, which was the Warhammer game.
It looked completely different.
With this monitor, it's the darkers or darker and the brighters are brighter.
I don't really know how to explain it.
It's almost like it feels like at first, it feels like the contrast is very high.
And you're like, oh, you just turned up the contrast.
But no, you're actually looking at just brighter colors.
And especially with the brighter colors, like lights and things and blooms and things like that just look insane on a decent, with a good video card.
So I have a 3090, it's got everything dialed up all the way.
And tuned the game specifically for darker environments.
So that was kind of a game changer to get the HDR right.
And I'll tell you, it was not fun.
This thing disappears still sometimes.
You can hold down Window Control Shift B, I think.
And that will turn on and off HDR, which actually doesn't do anything, but it does make the bedoop sound.
So that Windows can kind of find the monitor again.
And I only have to restart it every once in a while or log in and log off.
But for me, it hasn't been a deal breaker quite yet.
So we have, also there's ABS forums, HDR 10 test pattern set.
I use this to calibrate the monitor itself in the profiles.
So the weird thing about all this is you can buy like a particular expensive monitor calibration tool, whatever.
But I will generally just reset the monitor when I first get it.
And then I will do the least amount I'd can on the monitor itself to make the video look the way I wanted to look.
And Rtings has stuff for each monitor and I'll tell you exactly how to tune each one.
And they'll say that they're, oh, each one is completely different.
You know, your model is maybe area might be off by 0.01, whatever.
But in general, if you follow the guys for Rtings, they'll tell you exactly how to set up your monitor to be like the best it possibly should be.
With the colors and all that.
It's like turn this off, turn that off, turn this thing on, turn this thing on, and set this to 60 instead of 50.
So right now I haven't done any Rtings mappings.
I just now got the ACR stuff to work.
And that was enough for me.
A lot of people have issues with this thing going to sleep.
All the same song monitors tend to just disappear.
And it said I guess an issue with Windows more or less with the thing kind of disappearing on people.
So I'm in a lot of my entire idle stuff fixed at because every 10 seconds or every less than a second the mouse moves with the auto hucky.
So I have of course think off black equalizer on five 240 hertz.
But I've gotten this thing dialed in and it doesn't really give me any issues.
So so far so good.
But I will use definitely on the HDR.
That's in the show notes.
The HDR 10 test.
I'll do the black light levels.
I will definitely use those to calibrate the brightness because I don't like not seeing stuff.
If I have issues with seeing things, that's going to be a problem for me.
So they have different black level calibration tools.
So like this one says reference black.
I shouldn't see anything past 64.
And I can barely see if it wasn't so bright in here I could probably see the reference black blinking slightly.
And that's what I like.
I like the blacks actually washed out.
But when you do that with HDR it looks really bad.
So I had to get used to black being black for now at least.
So I'll use the black clipping, the white clipping.
I usually have a problem with.
And I can never really get the white clipping correct for doing calibration stuff.
So I'll go in here and look at this white and color clipping.
I've never really been able to get it.
Like here's one with thousand nids.
And you're supposed to be able to make this map to something in some capacity.
I can see all of these lit up.
I don't know.
And the website will tell you how to tutorial on how to make it work.
So for example, write my red.
Looks like it's clipping.
Everything looks more or less the same.
But my red is about midway through reds.
I'm losing my reds for some reason.
1,000 nids.
C723, I guess is like the color name.
But yeah, it's a whole thing.
This entire folder takes up the HDR 10 folder.
Is 11 gigs of space.
And the manual looks like, I don't know how many pages.
17 pages of just manuals on how to use it.
And then with that goes all the smoothies of what's better and who's better than what.
Let's see what else do I have.
HPR.
I essentially do this podcast twice so I can have show notes.
There's also a video with this guy.
Set and forget a HDR on Windows 11.
He talks about HDR and it's set up and ways to manage it and what it's going to look like, what you want it to look like.
But I'll say, like I said, the lighting is insane.
It's very bright.
And I have a link to my high contrast auto-hockey script that basically switches high contrast mode on.
And that helps with the brightness.
If you're in a room and it's too dark and you're just using regular browsing the regular internet,
your eyes are going to be very lit up like a Christmas tree.
So I usually keep it in dark mode.
I'll switch back and forth.
It's all F11 and F12.
And F12 will turn it off.
So if something's weird on the internet, a lot of sites aren't ADA compliant.
Not a lot.
But I would say one in 100 sites aren't ADA compliant.
And out of those 100, you know, there might be two or three of them that I visit a lot.
And it's kind of annoying to not be able to see what I'm selecting.
Or all the text be the same color as the background.
Or it's usually around selections or like type or links.
So like if I'm looking at text, all the text will be the same for red messages.
For like unread messages are going to be the same text as red messages.
So I'm looking at my inbox and there's two unread emails in here.
But I can't, I can barely tell one is bold and one is not bold.
So I can barely tell that these are two are unread.
But in general, it's, I leave it on the dark mode work.
Sorry.
H the high contrast mode.
When does it does?
11 does have a dark mode.
Let's see if I can find it.
I don't think it's, it doesn't do what you would think it is.
Yeah, turn on dark mode for apps, turn on dark mode system white.
I haven't mess with this.
Contrast themes.
So I don't even know where this sits actually.
Turn on dark mode for apps.
Yeah, I don't even see this.
It's not really an option for me.
So anyways, that's pretty much it.
I will say it is a bit ridiculous.
It is good for productive being productive.
A lot of people say don't buy a curved monitor for, for, for production stuff.
But I'm going from having dual monitors at work to having this.
And it's nice to be able to like bring up a browser and have a chat window open
and have another window.
So basically three monitors.
And I can move in between them fairly easily with the locking of the, of the stuff.
So I actually justified this, a browser window over here.
And now I have like basically three monitors.
So anyways, I would say, you know, it's, it's not for, not for everyone.
But I'm, I'm liking it for just doing development and stuff like that.
And I appreciate the real estate that I have now.
And I don't have to worry about where the monitor is or the display.
Where the, where my mouse is on the screen with dual monitors.
You have to kind of know where your mouse is going to be.
And it's kind of unnerving to separate those two out.
Where with this, you just, you have to get used to the paneling essentially.
And, and you can move, change the size of the panels to.
But it's easy to get a messed up.
So I'm usually constantly coming to mess with the windows.
I think that's just not getting, getting familiar with the way the tabbing works.
So if I alt tab to a specific window and not the main three window,
then it, I won't get the, what the actual output I want.
So anyways, it's just a matter of messing around with the, what do they call it?
The, the framing of the windows for each, for each split of it.
And you can manage those in the power toy stuff.
So anyways, I hope to help somebody out.
Again, I should also be in here and we should be good to go.
Take it easy.
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