Against Panasonic’s HDR Optimizer

Anyone else decide against using it? Using the Panasonic 820 player on an LG OLED I’ve turned it on and off on many paused scenes and come to the conclusion that it’s almost always detrimental. It’s never recovering good highlight information, it just looks like unnecessarily pulled down highlight. It’s often giving areas that should read as white a nasty off-color pall. Worse, it’s making areas that should be clean highlights a kind of muddy mid-tone.

In this world some things are really bright. HDR Optimizer is basically a compressor and making the image less brilliant. I thought the point of high dynamic range was… to have high dynamic range. So I think there’s a reason it’s off by default. Maybe a case could be made if one is using something like a projector but with a good OLED I think not.