Comment by dahart

That’s true, and it’s why tonemapping is distinct from HDR. If you follow the link from @xeonmc’s comment and read the comments, the discussion centers on the conflation of tonemapping and HDR.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43987923

That said, the entire reason that tonemapping is a thing, and the primary focus of the tonemapping literature, is to solve the problem of squeezing images with very wide ranges into narrow display ranges like print and non-HDR displays, and to achieve a natural look that mirrors human perception of wide ranges. Tonemapping might be technically independent of HDR, but they did co-evolve, and that’s part of the history.