> Naturally, we can stick brighter backlights in our monitors to make the difference between light and dark more significant,
It's actually the opposite that makes the biggest difference with the physical monitor. CRTs always had a residual glow that caused blacks to be grays. It was very hard to get true black on a CRT unless it was off and had been for some time. It wasn't until you could actually have no light from a pixel where black was actually black.
Sony did a demo when they released their OLED monitors where they had the top of each monitor type side by side: CRT, LCD, OLED. The CRT was just gray while the OLED was actually black. To the point that I was thinking in my head that surely this is a joke and the OLED wasn't actually on. That's precisely when the narrator said "and just to show that the monitors are all on" as the video switched to a test pattern.
As for the true question you're getting at, TFA mentions things like color matrix, primaries, and transfer settings in the file. Depending on the values, the decoder makes decision on the math used to calculate the values. You can use any of the values on the same video and arrive at different results. Using the wrong ones will make your video look bad, so ensuring your file has the correct values is important.
Note that crt's did not have bad blacks, they were far better than lcd displays. I am currently using an ips display and it has pretty good blacks, notably better than a normal lcd display. But I remember crt's being even better(probably just me being nostalgic for the good ol days when we were staring straight into an electron beam with only an inch of leaded glass to protect us). I Don't think they were lying, oleds are very very good(except for the burn in issue, but that's solvable), but I would be wary about the conclusions of a demo designed to sell something.
For what it's worth, the display I liked best was a monochrome terminal, a vt220, Let me explain, a crt does not really have pixels as we think of them on an modern display, but they do have a shadow mask which is nearly the same thing. however a monochrome crt(as found in a terminal or oscilloscope) has no shadow mask, the text of those vt220 was tight, it was a surprisingly good reading experience.
It's actually the opposite that makes the biggest difference with the physical monitor. CRTs always had a residual glow that caused blacks to be grays. It was very hard to get true black on a CRT unless it was off and had been for some time. It wasn't until you could actually have no light from a pixel where black was actually black.
Sony did a demo when they released their OLED monitors where they had the top of each monitor type side by side: CRT, LCD, OLED. The CRT was just gray while the OLED was actually black. To the point that I was thinking in my head that surely this is a joke and the OLED wasn't actually on. That's precisely when the narrator said "and just to show that the monitors are all on" as the video switched to a test pattern.
As for the true question you're getting at, TFA mentions things like color matrix, primaries, and transfer settings in the file. Depending on the values, the decoder makes decision on the math used to calculate the values. You can use any of the values on the same video and arrive at different results. Using the wrong ones will make your video look bad, so ensuring your file has the correct values is important.
From TFA: https://gist.github.com/arch1t3cht/b5b9552633567fa7658deee5a...