If you are making a video game or movie and you wast super-bright stuff on the screen, that's what HDR is for.
(Incidentally I'm a big gamer but I generally prefer to turn off HDR because it hurts my eyes. It's actually really annoying. I don't want certain parts of a scene to be extra-extra-bright.)
If you're giving me text, please don't second-guess whether I've set my monitor brightness appropriately. The vast majority of text I look at is already black-on-white. By reducing the contrast of your text you're assuming that everything else I look at is blinding me and somehow you're saving me with more appropriate contrast. No, I've set my monitor so everything else I look at looks right and what you're showing me is too washed out.
> If you're giving me text, please don't second-guess whether I've set my monitor brightness appropriately
Why would #000 text on #fff be the correct way? It’s common but not at all ubiquitous, there’s no standard for this.
> No, I've set my monitor so everything else I look at looks right and what you're showing me is too washed out.
If you don’t like the extra range you can easily increase the contrast and reduce the brightness, but the other way is very destructive. You can go from #def -> #fff with a simple transform but you can’t go the other way. And if you use 100% of your range in a single element, you have no room for using color, shadows and background, which is a critical tool for all complex design, including old school Windows and Mac UIs from the 90s.
That said, there should be better APIs/standardization and monitors should be better at adjusting brightness and contrast to lighting conditions. I don’t mind at all that people change to whatever suits them, in fact I wish it was easier to use things like reader mode (which ad-tech has been fighting against, hard). Lots of web sites suffer from all kinds of design issues these days, sometimes too low contrast, even for me.
(Incidentally I'm a big gamer but I generally prefer to turn off HDR because it hurts my eyes. It's actually really annoying. I don't want certain parts of a scene to be extra-extra-bright.)
If you're giving me text, please don't second-guess whether I've set my monitor brightness appropriately. The vast majority of text I look at is already black-on-white. By reducing the contrast of your text you're assuming that everything else I look at is blinding me and somehow you're saving me with more appropriate contrast. No, I've set my monitor so everything else I look at looks right and what you're showing me is too washed out.