Instagram Is Littered With Bright-As-Hell HDR Videos, But It Doesn’t Have To Be This Way

Whether they realize it or not, more people are posting HDR (high dynamic range) movies on social media, and when your expensive smartphone plays them, the display kicks into high gear to show off the “true-to-life colour and contrast” that HDR makes possible, in Apple’s words. But more than anything else having to do with colour, you’ll notice that your screen becomes extremely bright, whether you want it to or not.

For a few years now, high-end smartphones have had the ability to record HDR video. Samsung prefers HDR10 Plus, whereas Apple prefers Dolby Vision. However, I don’t believe these businesses have done a good job of educating customers about when and when the capacity is genuinely valuable — and when it’s preferable to leave it off. When using the default settings, which many people do when using their camera app, your iPhone will happily record your HDR concert records or vacation memories. You might not be aware, though, that when you post those videos to Instagram or other websites like Reddit, they will control the screen brightness for everyone watching on an iPhone with HDR capability.

Over the past few months, I’ve been more and more aware of this kind of behavior. You can see what I mean by watching any of The Rock’s most recent Instagram videos on an iPhone (like this lovely one). Why does this have HDR? What benefits are there? I’d contend that it appears better when I view it in SDR on a desktop browser without distractingly bright highlights drawing my focus away from the content. As a display and home theatre nerd, that feels completely at odds with who I am. The resulting videos can be breathtaking when HDR is handled skillfully and in the correct scenes. However, our phones are all too eager to rely on it for common, everyday clips.

However, a temporary “fix” might only include providing iPhone owners more discretion. Instagram doesn’t have a toggle to turn off HDR playback. This frequently too-bright playback experience cannot be disabled system-wide anywhere in the iOS settings. When you consider that it has been more than two years since the iPhone 12 series launched Dolby Vision recording, these look like big errors. It doesn’t follow that I want to view something in HDR or that my display settings should be disregarded just because it was captured in HDR. I anticipate the HDR on the TV in my living room to be really brilliant and vibrant. There are instances when I most definitely don’t need that when utilizing a mobile device.

For now, turning on iOS’ low power mode will enable HDR videos to play normally while preventing these arbitrary brightness jumps. But there must be a more straightforward, less complicated approach.