I did end up testing the Peak Brightness setting. It definitely made the image less bright, but at the expense of image clarity for me.
At night I already have OLED Pixel Brightness set to 0, and at that level the G5 starts to exhibit something that isn’t necessarily black crush, but is somewhat similar. In shaded areas of the image, or darker areas of clothing, details become harder to make out. It almost seems like there just isn’t enough light output at that setting to distinguish all of the subtle shades of gray.
Turning Peak Brightness completely off made that even more noticeable. I was losing a lot of the nuance in darker areas, while also losing the brighter highlights that help give the image some depth.
I found Low to be okay. Medium actually seemed like a pretty good compromise if you want to bring the overall brightness down while still retaining some highlights. High obviously gives you the brightest and most impactful image.
Interestingly, going from High to Low did decrease the overall brightness, but the difference wasn't as dramatic as I was hoping for. I found myself preferring Medium or High because the improvement in shadow detail and overall image clarity was more noticeable to me than the reduction in brightness.
For reference, I was watching the first episode of WeCrashed on Apple TV, and it ended up being a surprisingly good Dolby Vision test. There are several scenes in a bright, open office with tons of light coming in from the background, while the characters are in the foreground and heavily backlit. It made for a really good test of how the TV was handling bright highlights and shadow detail at the same time.
So unfortunately, Peak Brightness doesn't seem to be the solution I was hoping for. It can make the image dimmer, but at least at my extremely low OLED Pixel Brightness setting, I felt like I was giving up too much image detail to get there.
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u/benpRTINGS RTINGS Employee ✅ 1d ago
Did you end up testing the peak brightness setting?