I'm surprised when photographers dismiss dynamic range as being unimportant in a camera.
Maybe they didn't experience earlier cameras.
Lee Filters, Kase, Hitech etc are all making money from balancing high contrast scenes.
It would be much easier if it could be done without filters and I'm sure it will be possible in the future with computational photography.
Have you ever shot with Pan-X, Tri-X, or HP5? How about Kodachrome 64 or Velvia 50/100? In medium or large format? One still needed filters for many types of scenes that exceeded the 14 stops of DR of the best B&W film stocks.
Then you're at ISO 3200? 6400? And your DR is the same as everyone else. DR differences due to on vs off chip ADCs occur at low ISOs.
BINGO!!!
The stones don't move, but what you've described is not HDR. It's exposure blending.
It's all HDR imaging.
The only difference is how broadly or narrowly you decide to define the term
High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDR). Do you use the broader term as it has been historically used for over 150 years to reference techniques used to display details in a scene with higher dynamic range than the dynamic range of the display medium? Or do you insist on a very narrow definition that uses techniques that have only been around a couple of decades to argue that the only legitimate definition of
HDR is an 8-bit tone-mapped version of a 32-bit floating point light map created by combining multiple bracketed exposures? That's pretty much it.
HDR as the term is commonly used today is only one form of
High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI) that has been going on since at least the 1850s.
Gustave Le Gray took multiple exposures at different exposure values to create seascapes that used the bright sky from one glass plate negative and the darker sea and shore from another.
The
zone system when shooting and developing and
tone mapping performed in the darkroom in the mid-20th century was raised to an art form by Ansel Adams and others as they used developing times of film and dodging and burning of prints to lower the total dynamic range of a scene to what the photo papers they were using were capable of displaying. That's a form of HDR imaging.
In the realm of digital photography there are multiple techniques used to depict a scene with a
High Dynamic Range using a medium, such as a computer monitor or print, that is not capable of as great a contrast between the brightest and darkest parts of a scene as the scene itself contains. The narrow understanding that many people mean when they say HDR is only one such technique among many that can all legitimately be considered
High Dynamic Range Imaging.