HDR looks washed out in comparison to SDR

[Zeorth]

Hi!

 

So I recently got a MSI MEG 342C and I've never owned a QD-OLED panel or HDR panel before so I don't really know what I'm doing. I enabled HDR and Auto HDR in Win 11 and turned on peak 1000 nits in my monitor settings. But I feel like HDR looks washed out and the colors don't look vibrant at all when in HDR mode. Am I doing anything wrong?

I have attached screenshots of how the screen looks like with HDR On and HDR Off.

 

HDR OFF:

 

HDR On:

[RONOTHAN##]

Go through the HDR Calibration process in Windows 11, that usually fixes it. 

[Zeorth]

3 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Go through the HDR Calibration process in Windows 11, that usually fixes it. 

I have, above image is the result after. Maybe I'm just not used to HDR but it looks more washed out and grayish?

[OddOod]

I assume this is true of all your HDR content, not just this splash screen?
And that HDR is properly enabled in the monitor's OSD

[Zeorth]

Just now, OddOod said:

I assume this is true of all your HDR content, not just this splash screen?
And that HDR is properly enabled in the monitor's OSD

When playing Ori Will of the Wisps its not AS bad but things still look washed out. HDR is on in Peak 1000 Nits mode (there is also a True Black 400 mode).

[OddOod]

3 minutes ago, Zeorth said:

When playing Ori Will of the Wisps its not AS bad but things still look washed out. HDR is on in Peak 1000 Nits mode (there is also a True Black 400 mode).

Oh, well, the monitor is only rated for True Black 400. The 1000 is probably overcranking the brightness. What does the TB400 look like?

This is an interesting reddit post

 

[Zeorth]

2 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Oh, well, the monitor is only rated for True Black 400. The 1000 is probably overcranking the brightness. What does the TB400 look like?

This is an interesting reddit post

 

Haven't checked True Black 400 yet, I'll get back to you later. On a side note, bright pages get very dimmed as well and don't look as "white" and more beige. It's extremely noticeable in some games between 2 scenes how brightness is just drastically reduced.

Horizon Zero Dawn is the game that has performed the best for me so far. In that game HDR makes dark spaces darker and bright spaces brighter, in a cave I can't see anything besides pitch black and crystals look brighter but when HDR is off I can see everything in the cave.

[GuiltySpark_]

https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/testing-hdr400-true-black-and-peak-1000-mode-brightness-on-new-oled-monitors

 

Worth a skim through, if only for the conclusion. Stuff like this makes be glad I'm using an OLED TV as its far more straight forward. 

[Zeorth]

14 minutes ago, OddOod said:

Oh, well, the monitor is only rated for True Black 400. The 1000 is probably overcranking the brightness. What does the TB400 look like?

This is an interesting reddit post

 

Also side note, should I always keep HDR and Auto HDR on in Windows settings or only when viewing HDR content?

[GuiltySpark_]

17 minutes ago, Zeorth said:

Also side note, should I always keep HDR and Auto HDR on in Windows settings or only when viewing HDR content?

Depends, I don't want to have to think about turning it on and off depending on what I'm doing, and with RTX HDR for video and games, a lot more of what I do is in HDR so i'm certainly not going to be hitting the key combo and having my screen blank out for a second or two every time I open a video. I have the SDR brightness slider way down to 10 and live with calibrated HDR mode on all the time. 

 

You may want to check out at least the conclusion of the TFTCentral article above, however. Things operate a little differently with your monitor vs my LG C2 OLED TV. 

[Doobeedoo]

Another good thing to look https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/heres-why-you-should-only-enable-hdr-mode-on-your-pc-when-you-are-viewing-hdr-content

[Stahlmann]

It seems like this monitor's HDR EOTF (brightness) tracking seems to be all over the place, as reviewers ran into similar issues:

 

I linked the relevant section of Tim's video:

 

And RTINGS.com also measured weird brightness behavior in HDR:

 

Ideally the grey line should match the yellow line.