Hi,
There is a lot of talk about DR. Athough DR is an important parameter I often feel the need for DR is over emphasized.
Let's look at an image with high Luminance Range, shot with a camera with relatively small DR:
That image looks pretty good to me...
Now, take another image, shot with a camera that has a bit better DR:
It may be argued that either image may be better. But the DR advantage of the second camera is not that obvious. Now, let's look at some detail:
Here, the piano is quiet noisy. Now, let's look at the image with the camera having higher DR:
The second piano image is much cleaner. The first camera was 2007 generation CCD while the second one was 2012 generation CMOS. Modern CMOS sensors use thousands of analogue digital converters in parallell allowing for slow conversion times, while the older CCD designs used a handfull of off chip analogue to digital converters where each converter was very fast.
So, the reason modern cameras have higher DR is because they can reproduce darker areas with less noise.
There is nothing like highlight DR. Any sensor will clip at some well defined point. Expose beyond that and detail will be gone.
But, a sensor with clean readout can allow for some underexposure, that may be used to protect highlights.
Modern sensors can handle 13-14 EV of Engineering DR. But, monitors may handle just 9EV and prints even less. So, we need to map the high density range of the sensor to the narrow luminance range of the monitor or the reflectance range of the print.
Best regards
Erik