I’m under the impression this is caused by the use of “HDR mode”(s) and poor adaptive brightness implementations on devices. Displays such as the iPad Pro w/ OLED are phenomenal and don’t seem to implement an overactive adaptive brightness. HDR content has more depth without causing brightness distortion.
In contrast, my TV will change brightness modes to display HDR content and disables some of the brightness adjustments when displaying HDR content. It can be very uncomfortably bright in a dark room while being excessively dim in a bright room. It requires adjusting settings to a middle ground resulting in a mixed/mediocre experience overall. My wife’s laptop is the worst of all our devices, while reviews seem to praise the display, it has an overreactive adaptive brightness that cannot be disabled (along with decent G2G response but awful B2W/W2B response that causes ghosting).
Apple’s method involves a good deal of what they call “EDR”, wherein the display gamma is ramped down in concert with ramping the brightness up, so that the brighter areas get brighter while the non-bright areas remain dark due to gamma math; that term is helpful for searching their WWDC developer videos for more details.
It still looks like how they say where its way too bright and makes formerly “bright” whites appear even neutral grey surrounding the hdr content. Personally I find it extremely jarring when it is just a frame that is hdr within the overall screen. It is much nicer when the hdr content is full screen. Imo I wish I could just disable partial screen hdr and keep the full screen implementation because it is that distracting.
Out curiosity — I don’t have Instagram to test and this is a perceptual question anyways — if you enable iOS Settings > Accessibility > Display > Reduce White Point (25%) and increase the screen brightness slightly to compensate for the slight dimness; does that reduce or eliminate the ‘jarring’ness?
I’m talking about my macbook and that would be untenable because it needs max brightness on non hdr content in a daylight lit room.