While the exact amount of detail varies between prints and negatives, any piece of film has a limited amount of detail. However the resolution is limited. So you can get a clearer and smoother image as you go up, even if no new detail is revealed.
And wider color gamut and color depth isn’t the main thing about HDR. Essentially you can go deeper into the blacks before clipping (though your room has to be ludicrously dark to most of the advantages), and more importantly vastly higher into whites before clipping, or I should more accurately just say highlights and shadows. The issue with current display standards is that you lose color vibrancy as you go dark or as you go bright. Max brightness can only be white on traditional displays. The idea is to have such values actually still retain color saturation, allowing for color decisions previously not possible. This could be as simple as being able to have the blue sky of the dat actually look bright, more similar to what you’d see with your eye.
Now the dynamic range of your format does affect the amount of detail you can show off as you can’t recover clipped values in a shot, but the details that do exist can be spread across the whole HDR range. Many modern cinema cameras can now have that level of detail to adapt wonderfully to HDR as recording in flat LOG type formats allow for an incredible amount of light information to be compressed into the footage.
Many top notch 35mm film scans currently in existence, I could imagine have plenty enough detail to support an HDR grade.
A well timed and refined HDR grade of these films from a new 4K+ scan of the negatives has the potential to be quite immersive.
Film scans can often capture the full dynamic range (aprox 13 stops) of the film now, though standard displays lack the ability to display all that range at once with about 5 stops range.
Yeah, deeper shadows and brighter highlights = HDR + wider Color Gammut this is really going to be an improvement.
I think where all this stuff get’s a bit confused is that it is essentially great to SCAN a film source in 4K (capturing detail and high exposure to capture more color) but unless you have a massive screen there is not much benefit to displaying it in 4K.
HD HDR (1080p) will be great for home viewing if you you have a 65" screen in your living room get a 4k 65" screen ok that makes sense you will get some benefit from that having it being able to display 4K.
Resolution although it allows more detail you won’t notice the extra detail unless you are very close to the screen.
There are 4k resolution phones being released now and to get the benefit of that you would have to strap the phone on to your eyes practically. It’s not any thing worth having… perhaps if you want to walk around with a phone strapped to your face / VR or AR ok you might get a small benefit.
Even if you have a 4k 65" screen you will still need to be pretty close to notice the extra detail. But being a larger display it will be noticeable.
UHD is ok but it is being forced out too early. Wait for HDR which will be the big noticeable improvement. Resolution only really works on distance from the display. HDR is a different thing it’s actually something that will make a very noticeable difference. HDR will not improve you old DVD’s or Blu-rays content will need to be specifically prepared to enjoy HDR also bear that in mind.
I would not bother getting a full 4k resolution display I would actually say anything up to 46" your best bet will be UHD HDR or HD HDR
+50" screen I would say 4k starts to become viable as an option but more towards 60"+ the benefit is much more 80"+ screen all in no doubt for 4K.
I think one of the barriers to HDR rolling out on mass though is the ability to revert the display to being a normal color range and normal brightness contrast range so you can enjoy your old content that was not prepared for HDR specifically. It’s being able to turn off HDR when you don’t have HDR pumping in to it.