Steve Yedlin’s LG C2 settings, the myth of 100-nit SDR and HDR authorship

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, the highly anticipated sequel to Knives Out (2019), with cinematographer Steve Yedlin again at the helm, is out on Netflix this Friday, so those of you planning to watch it might be interested in the DP’s preferred settings on his LG C2 OLED TV, which he says allowed him to obtain results “pretty darn close to (though by no means fully up to) the precision of a studio reference monitor you might find in a professional color grading suite.” Which should come as no shock to those of us who follow Vincent Teoh’s HDTVTest YouTube channel, where, in his reviews, he regularly compares the performance of consumer displays to the industry gold standard Sony BVM-HX310 dual layer LCD mastering monitor. However, you might be surprised to learn that, for someone obsessed with visual authorship, Yedlin actually prefers watching movies at home at 150-175 nits, remarking that BT1886 100 nits is nothing more than a myth.

You might also wonder why someone who’s supervised and approved deliverables of his own films for both theatrical and home theater release in SDR as well as in HDR and Dolby Vision provides no recommended HDR settings. The answer is simple: like most films produced today, his have zero HDR intent; and why Netflix decides to release some movies in DV and others not is a profound mystery that even a sleuth as clever as Benoit Blanc couldn’t solve. Have to give credit to Yedlin, who understands that merely shooting on photochemical film or capturing RAW on a digital sensor capable of 15+ stops of dynamic range is decidedly not the same as shooting HDR, a fact that seems to escape the many who insist that we’ve been shooting HDR for the past century without even realizing it, which is complete and utter nonsense.