Comment by swed420
3 months ago
> It's absolutely bonkers to me that we've all collectively figured out how to stream a Hollywood movie to a pocket device over radio with a quality exceeding that of a typical cinema theatre, but these multi-trillion market cap corporations have all utterly failed to allow users to reliably send a still image with the same quality to each other!
You act like this is some kind of mistake or limit of technology, but really it's an obvious intentional business decision.
Under late stage capitalism, it'd be weird if this wasn't the case in 2026.
Address the underlying issue, or don't be surprised by the race to the bottom.
This theory utterly fails Hanlon's razor (or whatever the organizational/societal equivalent is).
On one hand, there have been (and still are!) several competing HDR formats for videos (HDR+, Dolby Vision, "plain" HLG, Dolby Vision in HLG etc.), and it tooks years for a winner to pull ahead – that race just started earlier, and the set of stakeholders is different (and arguably a bit smaller) than that for still images.
On the other hand, there are also several still image HDR formats competing with each other right now (JPEG with depth map metadata, i.e. Ultra HDR and ISO 21496-1, Apple's older custom metadata, HEIF, AVIF, JPEG XL...), and JPEG XL isn't the clear winner yet.
Format wars are messy, and always have been. Yes, to some extent they are downstream of the lack of a central standardization body, but there's no anti-HDR cabal anywhere. If anything, it's the opposite – new AV formats requiring new hardware is just about the best thing that can happen to device manufacturers.