Comment by amlib

I believe everything could be solved the same way we solved high dynamic range in audio, with a volume control.

I find it pretty weird that all tvs and most monitors hide the brightness adjustment under piles and piles of menus when it could be right there in the remote alongside the sound volume buttons. Maybe phones could have hardware brightness buttons too, at least something as easy as it is on adjusting brightness in notebooks that have dedicated brightness fn buttons.

Such brightness slider could also control the amount of tonemapping applied to HDR content. High brightness would mean no to low tonemapping and low brightness would use a very agressive tonemapper producing a similar image to the SDR content along it.

Also note that good audio volume attenuation requires proper loudness contour compensation (as you lower the volume you also increase the bass and treble) for things to sound reasonably good and the "tone" sound well balanced. So, adjusting the tonemapping based on the brightness isn't that far off what we do with audio.