On Amazon Prime Video, I started watching season two of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on an SDR Display. Immediately, upon the first episode, I noticed that the dark scenes in the beginning were way too dark to be nearly unwatchable. I figured it may have been the HDR setting, so I looked into the settings on the built-in Amazon Prime Video web video player to see if there was a toggle to turn HDR off, but there wasn’t. Next, I watched the series on a basic HDR 400 display and the dark scenes were fine.
I experimented on the various dark scenes comparing on HDR vs SDR displays, and the same darkness issue pertained on my SDR display. I don’t recall having this issue on season one of the series, so I asked a few of my friends about this, and they also stated this issue pertained on their SDR displays as well. Apparently, Amazon didn’t really have a good fallback and/or decent tone mapping from HDR to SDR when they uploaded the second season of The Rings of Power. This will probably continue to persist for future episodes and seasons.
HDR capable panels are quite common on TVs and phones, but not so much on computer monitors for both desktops and laptops.
