HDR or High Dynamic Range has been somewhat of a holy grail in the monitor space for quite a while now. While every manufacturer seems to know the hardware needed to achieve a true HDR experience, no one has managed to bring it to the masses. Unless you have one of the best HDR monitors with a high-end OLED or Mini-LED panel costing upwards of $700 (with $1,000 models being fairly common), you can't expect to see an actual HDR image on your screen.

The problem lies both with the misunderstood nature of HDR and the marketing lies spewed forth by monitor manufacturers. Plus, high-end panels with the chops to produce a superior HDR image still cost prohibitively more than the others. Although the market has seen a handful of decent HDR monitors come out in the last few months, we're far from the point where real HDR becomes commonplace on affordable monitors.

Current HDR certification is conveniently misused

HDR400? Same as no HDR

While making purchase decisions when buying a monitor, consumers can utilize the DisplayHDR certification of their shortlisted monitors. DisplayHDR is an open standard developed by VESA in collaboration with various PC manufacturers, and it rates monitors under multiple tiers. The lowest tier among these is DisplayHDR 400, which only requires 400 nits of peak brightness, 95% sRGB coverage, and global dimming on a monitor.

Without strict guidelines for local dimming and contrast, this certification means nothing at all. Simply cranking up the brightness levels to 400 nits does little to produce a good HDR image — all it does is produce dirty blacks and blooming artifacts around smaller bright objects. The DisplayHDR 400 standard is what you'll see on the majority of affordable monitors under $500, but it's nothing you should be excited about. It's simply an easy label slapped on top of a mediocre product to make it seem better than it actually is.

While there are higher tiers under the DisplayHDR standard which require local dimming and higher peak brightness numbers extending up to 1400 nits, you'll only see appreciable results starting at the DisplayHDR 1000 level. Monitors with that quality rating will cost you considerably more. There's some good news on the horizon though — the new "DisplayHDR 1.2" standard will introduce stricter requirements for brightness, color accuracy, local dimming, and black levels.

Starting May 2025, the new standard will force manufacturers to improve the underlying hardware even on their budget models in order to acquire the DisplayHDR 400 and higher certifications. Whether companies will start adopting the new standard proactively is up for debate; but until then, most of us will be limited to sub-par (or non-existent) HDR experiences on the bulk of mainstream monitors.

True HDR is reserved for OLEDs and Mini-LEDs

HDR progress on budget monitors is awfully slow

OLED monitors and, more recently, Mini-LED monitors have raised consumer expectations of what an HDR image should look like on a PC. OLED monitors from Samsung, Dell, Asus, LG, and others have long been the benchmark against which every other monitor is compared, as far as black levels, local dimming, and contrast ratio are concerned.

Mini-LED panels are a great middle ground between crappy IPS panels and market-leading OLED panels, but they're much closer in pricing to the OLEDs than most of the $300-$400 IPS and VA monitors. But, in the last few months, some affordable Mini-LED HDR1000 monitors have arrived on the scene that offer around 400-600 local dimming zones, IPS-crushing contrast ratios, and most importantly, sub-$300 pricing.

The AOC Q27G3XMN is the most popular of these new-age "affordable real HDR" monitors that don't seem to make too many compromises while providing an actually worthy HDR experience. But, the rate at which these monitors are launching has been too slow for my taste. We're still waiting for some more announced models to arrive from Acer, AOC, MSI, Cooler Master, and ViewSonic before we herald a new era of HDR on PC displays.

2024 might be the turning point for affordable HDR

If we're already seeing sub-$300 Mini-LED monitors offering a considerably better HDR experience than similarly priced IPS monitors, then there's hope for affordable HDR in the near future. What remains to be seen is the pricing of some of the upcoming models that raise the number of local dimming zones to 1000+ while trying to stay competitive with high-end OLED and Mini-LED options. But, after a long period of feeling disillusioned by so-called HDR, I'm looking forward to shopping for a new HDR monitor in the near future to replace my trusty old LG 27GL850.