1104 Citizen Kane

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#476 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Dec 01, 2021 4:22 pm

Very informative, thanks David!

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#477 Post by EddieLarkin » Wed Dec 01, 2021 7:47 pm

david hare wrote:
Wed Dec 01, 2021 6:52 pm
Finally, my last words on this. If you have a Panny 820/420 or subsequent player with the HDR "Mode" button, simply toggle it to "Light Environment". Hey Presto, the image is perfect. Now, suddenly clouds lift, veils fall aside and natural white levels are back. What we used to call "Contrast" is back, and there is no deleterious effect at all on the superb grayscale and grading. One suspects they have been grading this with an incredibly high brightness monitor. I have absolutely no idea what if any other UHD players can address this. I tnow looks like the superb effort they meant it to be. It just needs to be fucking re graded with real world domestic monitors in mind.
Changing that setting is simply adjusting the tone mapping, it is not doing anything to the image itself. The difference you're seeing is a result of how your projector is changing its output based on what data it's receiving from the player.

To put it more clearly, neither image is how the disc actually looks. They're just different interpretations your player and projector are making. It's great that one of these you find to be successful, but it doesn't necessarily have any bearing on how this grade actually looks at source.

As for the monitor used in the grading, all HDR grades are done on at least a 1,000 nit monitor, which is far brighter than your projector could dream of approaching, and by the looks of it, twice as bright as your Panny LED. If you hit Playback Info twice on your 820 remote, the metadata screen will tell you both the brightness level of the grading monitor used and the specific maximum brightness levels the CK grade reaches. It would be very interesting to know those numbers.

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andyli
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#478 Post by andyli » Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:42 pm

I've been meaning to ask this for a while, but is there a way to show metadata with my Sony UBP X800 m2 ?

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#479 Post by EddieLarkin » Thu Dec 02, 2021 6:38 am

andyli wrote:
Wed Dec 01, 2021 8:42 pm
I've been meaning to ask this for a while, but is there a way to show metadata with my Sony UBP X800 m2 ?
I don't believe so, I'm pretty sure it's something only found on the Oppo 203/205, and the Panny 820/9000.

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dustybooks
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#480 Post by dustybooks » Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:45 pm

Did anyone else end up just mailing their disc in the old-fashioned way after a long night of realizing how difficult it is to break a Blu-ray??

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The Fanciful Norwegian
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#481 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:50 pm

I'm a little ashamed to admit this since it's not at all what it was designed for, but I used a rotary trimmer at work. Even then it took a few tries to get it to the point where I could snap it in two by hand. A guillotine trimmer probably would've worked better.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#482 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:02 pm

dustybooks wrote:
Thu Dec 02, 2021 1:45 pm
Did anyone else end up just mailing their disc in the old-fashioned way after a long night of realizing how difficult it is to break a Blu-ray??
I used a dull pair of kitchen scissors (on hearthesilence's suggestion) which did the trick with minimal issues- took like 1-2 minutes easy

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jsteffe
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#483 Post by jsteffe » Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:21 pm

I used garden shears, since they're stronger. It was easy to cut that way.

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tenia
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#484 Post by tenia » Thu Dec 02, 2021 2:37 pm

I just received my UHD/BD copy and wow, this packaging is a clusterf*** of poor unpractical idea.

The outer case is slim and the inner digipack soft, so both are prompt to be damaged and bent. Of course, mine are.
As the inner digipack unfolds in 4 directions (instead of being linear) and that the outer case is an O-card, that's extra inner digipack to be rubbed and scraped (unlike the 2008 digipacks). Mine is scraped at the bottom (the extension to the E flap).

The cross-4-panels unfolding is of course unconvenient by the space it takes when unfolded. It also has no specific element to maintain the booklet in place, so once it's unfolded, you better be on a flat table to (try and) remove the discs or the booklet will fall. And as the openings of the slots are small, you're going to struggle and mingle and put your fingers on the discs and feel you're going to rip the whole thing apart so of course it's going to fall. In particular, the left and right slots (which contains the main discs - UHD on the left, BD1 on the right)... have openings towards the center of the digipacks instead of have more convenient openings towards the exterior (where, you know, there's space to remove the discs). A nightmare.

Finally, because the devil is in the details, I wondered in all this : how the hell am I going to find which disc is in which slot since it seemed there was no indication on the packaging.
It turns out there ARE indications. They're printed next to the slots' openings... except that they're printed so far for the center piece of the digi that 3 out of 4 are masked by the discs at least partially. In my case, only 4K UHD can be read with the disc in the slot, Blu Ray 2 and Blu Ray 3 are partially hidden by the discs (even when pushed at the maximum within the slots) and Blu Ray 1 is fully hidden by the disc.

The whole thing looks like it was designed fully on computer and nobody thought of testing one final product just to check out the design. What I call "an Engineer idea" : it looks fine on the paper, but it's a nightmare in real life.
I'm seriously thinking of cutting the whole thing into 5 pieces in order to at least have slots where I take the discs out.

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Finch
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#485 Post by Finch » Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:46 pm

None of us should have to futz with our players' settings to make the Criterion edition look the way it should have in the first place, and many people won't even have the option to adjust the settings. None of us should have to consider the Warner UHD as a viable, never mind a superior alternative. If it wasn't for the WKW set, I'd be sorely tempted to nominate Citizen Kane for the most flawed release of the year. At this point, if the Warner encode delivers, I'd be like fuck the extras on the Criterion and settle for a great encode AND sensible packaging that doesn't damage the discs.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#486 Post by EddieLarkin » Thu Dec 02, 2021 8:55 pm

Finch wrote:
Thu Dec 02, 2021 7:46 pm
None of us should have to futz with our players' settings to make the Criterion edition look the way it should have in the first place, and many people won't even have the option to adjust the settings. None of us should have to consider the Warner UHD as a viable, never mind a superior alternative. If it wasn't for the WKW set, I'd be sorely tempted to nominate Citizen Kane for the most flawed release of the year. At this point, if the Warner encode delivers, I'd be like fuck the extras on the Criterion and settle for a great encode AND sensible packaging that doesn't damage the discs.
You're not quite getting it. If David finds that "Standard" or "Off" on his Optimiser settings result in a picture he's unhappy with, and "Light Environment" results in a picture that he is happy with, then that's proof that the issues he sees are nothing to do with the grade itself, but how his equipment is performing the tone mapping. All that setting does is change how much highlight information should be sacrificed for brightness. Choosing Light Environment is simply opting for more brightness, which is fixing the dull whites and thus bringing contrast back to the image, at the expense of highlight detail elsewhere. But the grade itself, as it exists on the disc, will be both bright enough to not suffer with any contrast issue and retain all the intended highlight detail.

People need to understand this key difference between SDR and HDR. With SDR, you can pump that image into any modern TV, and if it's calibrated you're going to get to see pretty much exactly what is on that disc, and how a particular grade looks, and so then you can make a fair judgement. HDR is an entirely different story. If you have equipment that cannot represent a HDR grade 1:1 (and whether it can or not will vary grade to grade, as unlike SDR, HDR does not have a set range), your equipment is then going to have to CHANGE THE IMAGE to fit its own parameters. The further away your equipment is from being able to reproduce a paritcular grade (say, if you're using a projector), THE MORE IT WILL HAVE TO CHANGE THE IMAGE. All David's done is have his equipment change the image in a different way.

But once you're getting into this territory, you cannot then declare that a grade is fucked! It's akin to watching a Blu-ray on a standard def TV and then complaining it's not as sharp as you expected a nice new 2K OCN restoration to be.

As for the WB UHD, I don't understand why anyone is expecting it to be different. Criterion and WB worked on this new remaster together, so why would there be any changes to the grading between UHDs?

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Finch
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#487 Post by Finch » Thu Dec 02, 2021 9:32 pm

That makes sense. Thanks for the explanation, Eddie.

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swo17
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#488 Post by swo17 » Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:08 pm

Is this the same kind of thing that explains why the Goodfellas UHD is generally so poorly reviewed?

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schellenbergk
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#489 Post by schellenbergk » Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:51 pm

EddieLarkin wrote:
Thu Nov 25, 2021 5:28 am
schellenbergk wrote:
Wed Nov 24, 2021 10:00 am
EddieLarkin wrote:
Wed Nov 24, 2021 9:55 am
Yeah, the HDR (or Dolby Vision) pop up will appear whenever the TV switches to that mode.
So - it seems to be the disc. (Heavy sigh)
UHD caps are up at caps-a-holic and the black level is broadly the same as the old Blu-ray, but a bit deeper. So if this is looking washed out and sepia tinted on your set then I suspect something is going wrong. What TV is it, and are you watching in HDR10?
The set says HDR when I put the disc in. So… dunno. Never seen any menu setting that says hdr10.

Also, the UHD of “It’s a Wonderful Life” looks fine. As do the other clips on the Kane supplemental blu-rays.

But skipping over several seconds in the middle of the film can’t be blamed on the set. Which is a 55” TCL Roku TV.

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therewillbeblus
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#490 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Dec 02, 2021 11:53 pm

swo17 wrote:
Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Is this the same kind of thing that explains why the Goodfellas UHD is generally so poorly reviewed?
I'd be interested as well- and would appreciate if we figured out a way for the Master List on the first page of the UHD 'To Be or Not To Be' thread to reflect opportunities for how we can alter the TV to make the disc show its optimal potential, if it is indeed an optimal encode (I'm not sure how best to initiate this, but perhaps, instead of putting something like Citizen Kane in a lesser category, there could be a note "increase brightness level to achieve optimal image quality" next to it in the Positive category- rather than create another sub-category of 'stellar image, if you manipulate your TV correctly'). Just a thought, but I don't want to avoid buying discs placed in lower-level categories if they are actually terrific and I just need to, like, press a button

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#491 Post by EddieLarkin » Fri Dec 03, 2021 7:01 am

swo17 wrote:
Thu Dec 02, 2021 10:08 pm
Is this the same kind of thing that explains why the Goodfellas UHD is generally so poorly reviewed?
It's an interesting point of comparison, as I've since been informed the Citizen Kane UHD has a nit range that tops out at 169. Goodfellas is 247! Making Kane the lowest HDR grade I've heard of, indeed it doesn't really count as HDR at all, Criterion could have easily made this one of their 4K SDR discs and probably saved all this trouble.

Which of course throws my theory of it having a high nit range that some set ups are struggling with right in the toilet. Every HDR TV in the world should have no problem showing Kane, yet even SDR converted caps from two different places are coming out different: one fine with strong contrast, the other dull and washed out.

The reason Goodfellas got bad reviews was the same reason any low nit grade gets bad reviews: if people are used to watching SDR at 200-300 nits peak, then a HDR grade that spends nearly all its time at sub 100 nits (as Goodfellas and Kane will), is going to look dim. This is the difference between an absolute luminance system like HDR, and a relative one like SDR. Even though all SDR is graded to peak at 100 nits, you can play it back at however high your TV goes. But HDR has its levels essentially locked in, if a particular scene is say, 20 nits, you're seeing it at 20 nits whether you like it or not, whether your room is set up for it or not. Even a HDR grade that has high peaks, what we'd think of a more normal grade level for HDR, still may spend most of its time in the sub 100 SDR range. This is how Universal tend to grade, by keeping the average picture in SDR territory and using HDR for the brief moments of highlights. So even they sometimes get complaints about being dim.

Ultimately what this means is, unlike SDR which can be brightened to meet home room conditions, HDR is locked at grading suite conditions, i.e. completely light controlled. The more you move away from such viewing conditions, the more the grade is going to get compromised. Try and watch Goodfellas during the day with light hitting your TV, you're not going to be able to make out a damn thing during dark scenes. Switch over to the Blu-ray and hey presto, you're back on a relative luminance system and your TV can now compensate for how light your room is, and everything is a-ok. You can now proceed to your favourite forum to tell everyone how crappy and dim the Goodfellas UHD is!
david hare wrote:
Fri Dec 03, 2021 2:44 am
There’s one problem, Eddie. It still looks awful on my Premium LED Panny with DV.

It has been, simply fucked up by Criterion or one of their posts.
I did acknowledge that your TV only reaches around 500 nits, which is low for an LCD set, and is why it is not Premium Certified. Dolby Vision isn't some miracle worker, it's still limited by the TVs specifications, though I'll certainly acknowledge you shouldn't be experiencing any issues anyway based on the level Kane has been graded to. I should hold further comment until I actually see the disc.

mkozlows
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#492 Post by mkozlows » Sat Dec 04, 2021 1:41 am

EddieLarkin wrote:
Fri Dec 03, 2021 7:01 am
It's an interesting point of comparison, as I've since been informed the Citizen Kane UHD has a nit range that tops out at 169. Goodfellas is 247! Making Kane the lowest HDR grade I've heard of, indeed it doesn't really count as HDR at all, Criterion could have easily made this one of their 4K SDR discs and probably saved all this trouble.
It's a very subtle HDR grade, but to my mind, that's a good thing. Pull in the kind of dynamic range that film gets you without cranking everything up to 11 for Max Contrast. I think it's a tasteful use of HDR in a place where restraint is appropriate.

What you get out of doing it in HDR is a) that greater dynamic range -- 167 nits isn't super-bright, but on the other hand, it's nearly twice as bright as the 100 nits of reference SDR; and b) more subtle gradations of gray, as a 10-bit PQ curve gives you somewhere between 550-600 discrete brightness levels in that 0-167 nit brightness range, whereas an 8-bit BT.1886 SDR gamma curve gives you less than 250 discrete levels.

I suspect that the people who are complaining about it being too dark are (as you alluded to) not watching movies in reference conditions. It's my experience that very, very few people actually have their SDR modes set to top out at 100 nits (this is what you get with Filmmaker Mode on LG OLEDs, and to most people that will look shockingly dim), and if you're used to watching SDR movies with an average brightness level of 300-400 nits, then an HDR movie with much lower brightness levels is going to look unwatchably dark to you.

If you don't want to switch to watching things in the dark, then use your TV's settings that are designed to account for this -- Dolby Vision IQ or "Dolby Home" or whatever setting it is that decouples DV output from actually following the standard exactly and lets it push brighter for your room.

But if you do watch movies in the dark with everything set up properly on a set with good HDR capability, then there's no problem and this 4K HDR encoding looks excellent. It is absolutely not screwed up.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#493 Post by EddieLarkin » Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:45 am

mkozlows wrote:
Sat Dec 04, 2021 1:41 am
What you get out of doing it in HDR is a) that greater dynamic range -- 167 nits isn't super-bright, but on the other hand, it's nearly twice as bright as the 100 nits of reference SDR
Nits are measured logarithmically, so unless I've got my math wrong, this means 10,000 nits (the highest point of the PQ range) is twice as bright as 100 nits, and 1000 nits is only 50% brighter than 100 nits. Meaning 169 is in fact only 11% brighter than 100 nits. Not that I'm disagreeing with your arguments, I'm sure there will still be some benefits to using HDR, the question is are they are going to be that subtle that the majority won't notice even when directly comparing to the new BD, and that those with lower end sets would in fact have been better off with a 4K SDR UHD instead (which would have still been 10 bit, not 8).

mkozlows
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#494 Post by mkozlows » Sat Dec 04, 2021 11:10 am

Yeah, fair enough (and corrections noted). But I guess to me, UHD-BD is such a hyper-niche format that I think its goal should be to make the best possible reference quality version of a thing, even if the benefits are subtle and doing that makes it slightly less mainstream-friendly -- it's just not a technology that the mainstream even cares about.

That said, I also think that if you do watch HDR stuff in a bright room, it's worth figuring out what your TV's settings are that let you do that sensibly, because this might be the most egregious place that you'll see this problem, but it's not the only one.

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kuzine
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#495 Post by kuzine » Sat Dec 04, 2021 5:49 pm

EddieLarkin wrote:
Sat Dec 04, 2021 8:45 am
Nits are measured logarithmically, so unless I've got my math wrong, this means 10,000 nits (the highest point of the PQ range) is twice as bright as 100 nits, and 1000 nits is only 50% brighter than 100 nits. Meaning 169 is in fact only 11% brighter than 100 nits.
As far as I can see this is not true, but if you have a source I'd be curious to see it. Apologies for the technical nature of the rest of my post but this is a physicist speaking (full caveat: this is just from looking things up right now out of curiosity, it's not anything I've had to deal with personally).

Nits is the unit of luminance and corresponds to candela per square meter, where candela is one of the base SI units. Candela is a very weird base SI unit (compared to the others like meter, kilogram, second etc.) in that it involves a function that quantifies the perception of light by a human (so in a way it's not as objective a unit as for instance a second or meter is). But you can somewhat compare the candela to a unit for radiant intensity as quantified for visible light perceived by a human instead of general radiation (visible light being electromagnetic radiation in a certain frequency/wavelength range). Nits is then the equivalent of a unit of radiance, but again as quantified for visible light perceived by a human.

Where the possible mention of logarithms maybe comes from is that radiation (power) quantities like these are often expressed in logs of the quantity to some reference value [called P_0 further], the most common one being decibel where P [expressed in dB] = 10log_10(P [in normal units]/P_0 [in normal units]). In that way 0dB corresponds to the reference value, 10dB to 10 times the reference value, 20dB to 100 times the reference value etc. But that is also different from what you describe, it means for instance that an increase of 3dB corresponds to a doubling of the value of the quantity. What you describe would be more like a power scale: P [in your units] = 10 ^ (P/P_0), which is as far as I know not used anywhere.

In any case, neither of these enter in the definition of nits, which is plain candela per square meter so 169 nits would still be 1.7 times brighter than 100 nits. Unless I'm wrong of course.. :wink: .
Last edited by kuzine on Sat Dec 04, 2021 5:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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kuzine
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#496 Post by kuzine » Sat Dec 04, 2021 5:52 pm

...

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ianthemovie
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#497 Post by ianthemovie » Sat Dec 04, 2021 5:55 pm

On the subject of the other poorly handled aspect of this release: does anyone know whether a thick Amaray case would fit inside the outer slipcase for the 4-disc edition? If so, would the booklet also fit?

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swo17
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#498 Post by swo17 » Sat Dec 04, 2021 6:32 pm

Nope. The booklet alone is the same height as a Blu-ray case (so wouldn't fit in one) and maybe half an inch wider than one (so definitely wouldn't fit). And then the O-card is obviously even wider to fit the booklet housed by several folds of cardboard

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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#499 Post by ianthemovie » Sat Dec 04, 2021 6:43 pm

swo17 wrote:
Sat Dec 04, 2021 6:32 pm
Nope. The booklet alone is the same height as a Blu-ray case (so wouldn't fit in one) and maybe half an inch wider than one (so definitely wouldn't fit). And then the O-card is obviously even wider to fit the booklet housed by several folds of cardboard
I was hoping to do the opposite: move some of the discs to a plastic Blu-ray case and put that inside the Criterion slipcase alongside the booklet.

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EddieLarkin
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Re: 1104 Citizen Kane

#500 Post by EddieLarkin » Sat Dec 04, 2021 6:59 pm

kuzine wrote:
Sat Dec 04, 2021 5:49 pm
As far as I can see this is not true, but if you have a source I'd be curious to see it.
I've certainly encountered it a number times stated as a fact. A quick Google turned up this article:

https://www.lightspace.lightillusion.com/uhdtv.html
It is worth pointing out that due to the logarithmic response of the human eye to changes in light levels, the present day SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) Rec709 'standard' of 100 nits is actually around 50% of PQ based HDR's 10,000 nits peak level.
Remember that the difference between 100 nits and 200 nits is a logarithmic difference, not a doubling of brightness, so is actually rather small.
Perhaps a reading of the full article will square things for you? I honestly don't know the science behind any of it so cannot explain why this would or would not be true.

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