High dynamic range or HDR. Everyone's telling you "you need to get it." "It's an amazing thing." But what they don't tell you is what kind of hardware do you actually need to have good experience? So behind me I've got and assortment of monitors today. Everything from ASUS's ProArt PA32UCX, this is a $4,000 HDR monitor intended for content creators, all the way down to this. I'm actually really excited about this one! This is the NEWSYNC X250FG Zero 165, used to be something else they got a sticker on there, HDR.

So we're gonna go all the way from the highest level of VESA certification, DisplayHDR 1,000, own to DisplayHDR 600, down to 400, and down to something that says HDR on the box, but doesn't feature any certification whatsoever, and see if it really does make a difference.

My original intention was to start with the cheapest monitor, and then work my way up. Determining if the additional performance, was worth the additional cost. But, what I realized was that without the context of the god-tier monitor, I would actually have to go back and revisit those cheaper ones, because I might not have realized, while looking at them, what I was missing out on. So I'm gonna get my desk torn apart here, and get this thing which I'm actually gonna be seeing in person for the first time.

Opened up here - whoa this one's really heavy! This is really exciting. This is, as far as I'm aware, the first monitor with support for HDR10, Dolby Vision, HLG, and I think there might even be one other HDR standard that it's compliant with. And yes it costs four grand, but there's a lot of tech that goes into making a monitor that delivers a really great HDR experience. So it features over a thousand zones of local dimming, it's got a quantum dot layer to enable its otherwise, ya know, pedestrian IPS panel to achieve better contrast and better color reproduction, and, of course, it is meticulously calibrated before it leaves the factory; hence the calibration report.

Would ya look at that? The stand doesn't even cost $1,000. Holy crap, the move to OLED cannot happen soon enough for professional displays. I don't remember the last time I saw a monitor this thick, but wasn't from like 2002. Turning HDR on. I'm not necessarily convinced that that kicked in.

Got it sorted, it didn't look good because the room was under bright studio lighting, so I've dimmed the room a little bit now, and this is a spectacular scene to use as an example of what a good HDR gaming display will do for you. We can see all the dimly lit details exactly as they would look to our eyes inside the weapon shop here. But when we switch back to this shop, where we can see people walking around in the bright sunlight, the look of our indoor characters doesn't change, while these guys you can actually pick them out shockingly well on this monitor.

Obviously, this isn't a gaming focused display. But in games that support HDR, you can see a very similar difference in the environmental lighting. Where shadows are dark and gloomy but still detailed, and then bright points, like the sun shining through the foliage, are kind of blinding to your eyes as you're slinking about, you know, looking for a jaguar to fight, or whatever the case may be. Man, this is a pretty game in HDR. The headline difference between HDR-1000 and HDR-600, is, obviously, the difference in peak brightness. It goes from 1,000 Nits, down to just 600 Nits. But, one slightly less obvious difference, is that on an HDR-600 monitor, the manufacturer is only required to hit, for a sustained period, 350 Nits, compared to 600 in HDR-1000. Wow, that's a heavy one.

Digging around in the menus, as you can see just like our display HDR-1000 model, our 600 model also supports local dimming. When they created the specifications, the VESA organization said they didn't think, that with modern technology, 600 or 1,000 levels would be achievable without local dimming, so I guess that has stood up pretty well so far. HDR might have turned off when I was-