Panasonic, which has been partnering with Company3 CEO Stefan Sonnenfeld since 2017, invited reviewers to visit the post-production house to promote their TVs. Paolo Centofanti of the Italian tech website DDay.it writes:
“According to the colorists of Company 3, the company responsible for the post-production of 80% of Hollywood series and movies, you don’t need such brilliant TVs: the real advantages of HDR are in the darkest tones. The rest is marketing.
Almost all HDR gradings are at 1000 nits.
During our visit we had the opportunity to talk at length about HDR with the various colorists and the surprising thing is that everyone wanted to point out that despite the marketing of the TV producers focusing a lot on peak brightness, the benefits of HDR formats have nothing to do with brighter images. ‘The HDR format finally gives us more freedom and leeway on the darker areas of the image,’ Mike Chiado told us, ‘HDR is about shadows and all the nuances we can now play with thanks to the extra bits available. I don’t understand why there is so much interest in brightness that it can be about special effects at most.’
Both [Cody] Baker and [Siggy] Ferstl, in the course of our chats, pointed out how pushing the highlights too high leads to distract the viewer from what matters in the frame and showed us in the studio how climbing above 1,000 nits can be counterproductive for the overall rendering of the image, making it impossible to grasp a whole series of nuances due to the adaptation that our eye faces.
‘We don’t want viewers to be dazzled or annoyed. Rarely are there shots where it makes sense to push details up to 1000 nits, if not in a special effects science fiction movie like lasers,’ Cody Baker told us. This is also why grading at 4,000 nits is very rare. The last of Company 3 was Star Wars VII Baker told us, and almost all of it is done at 1,000 nits, but usually with highlights that mostly hardly push beyond 400 or 500 nits. When we pointed out that at CES Hisense announced a 10,000-nit TV, the colorist burst into a big laugh, concluding with the English equivalent of a ‘that’s bullshit’.”
In spite of the protestations by the colorists of Company3 against the marketing of ever-brighter TVs, Panasonic’s Z95A, the first TV from a third-party manufacturer to use LG’s “Meta Technology 2.0 MLA+”, promises to be among the brightest OLED televisions released in 2024. So, do Company3 colorists really despise powerful highlights? Some of Company3’s work takes advantage of very bright highlights, others not so much. The very same colorist could create a brilliant masterpiece of HDR grading with dazzling highlights and inky black shadows one day and a drab, low-con grade the next. Stefan Sonnenfeld’s grading of The Equalizer 3 had the most searingly intense highlights we’ve ever seen on an actor’s face. Meanwhile, Bill Ferwerda’s grading of Clark was brilliant, the most inventive use of HDR’s color palette and extended range in our experience. The very same colorist is proud of his work on The Handmaids Tale, whose highlights never exceed 100 nits. Company3 was also responsible for Where The Crawdads Sing, a Dolby Vision release with highlights that peak at 150 nits and that was indistinguishable from SDR.
In the article, the colorists say they don’t want to make shows so bright that they dazzle or annoy viewers, but most of the complaints we’ve seen, some of which actually have gone viral, have been about shows like The Mandalorian and House of the Dragon being too dark.
The Daejeon Chronicles 
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