Hey everyone, new to the forum here. I just got my KS9000 a few days ago and I'm having problems regarding "HDR mode"/peak brightness with HDR content.
So, I looked at a bunch of tests of this TV before buying and decided on this one mainly because of the high peak brightness with HDR content. I upgraded from a Samsung KU6300, so I got quite used to what ~425 nit peak brightness looks like. According to rtings.com, the KS9000 has a sustained 100% peak brightness of 536 nits, which I'd assume is always the case (no matter what's on the screen) when viewing non-HDR content with the backlight setting at 20, and I'd say that pretty much matches my perception compared to the KU6300.
I was quite excited to be blown away by the apparently up to 1489 nit peak brightness (or at least 1000, since the TV is marketed so) when viewing HDR content, but even with a fairly dark image with only small highlights, I'm honestly not seeing a difference in peak brightness versus non-HDR content (and at the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, I have a very keen eye for things like this).
I've been reading this thread quite a bit, as well as any other information that I can find. I know that the picture mode has to be set to Movie, and Smart LED must be set to High. I've also done the sanity check of setting the Movie mode's backlight to 10 prior to starting HDR content, and then checking to see if it changes to 20 when the HDR content starts. It seems like everything is functioning properly, I'm just honestly not seeing a difference at all.
If anyone is curious as to what my HDR source is, I'm running Shadow Warrior 2 on PC with an NVIDIA GTX 1080. The game has an option for HDR displays, and upon enabling that option, my TV notifies me that it is indeed receiving an HDR source.
Also, I've noticed very strange behavior when I switch immediately back to non-HDR content. The image is horrendously drenched with contrast (like using the Levels tool in Photoshop and dragging the black and white points towards the center), and subtle color shades and grays become primary colors and harsh black and white.
My TV firmware version is 1142. I didn't do any of these tests prior to updating the firmware.
So, my question to everyone is this. How apparent is the peak brightness change from non-HDR to HDR content on this TV for you guys? I know this TV can't sustain 1000+ nits peak brightness on an image with a lot of bright areas for very long, so how dark does the source image have to be? Has anyone else experienced any of these problems? Is it possible that there's something wrong with my TV?
I would have imagined the difference between ~500 nits to ~1000 nits to be drastic, but I'm just not seeing any difference. Any insight would be very much appreciated!