The disclosed techniques use a display device, optionally including optical and/or non-optical sensors providing information about the ambient environment of the display device—along with knowledge of the content that is being displayed—to predict a viewer of the display device's current visual adaptation. Using the viewer's predicted adaptation, the content displayed on the display device may be more optimally encoded. This encoding may be accomplished at encode time and may be performed in a display pipeline or, preferably, in the transfer function of the display itself—thereby reducing the precision required in the display pipeline. For example, in well-controlled scenarios where the viewer's adaptation may be fully characterized, e.g., a viewer wearing a head-mounted display (HMD) device, the full dynamic range of the viewer's perception may be encoded in 8 or 9 bits that are intelligently mapped to only the relevant display codes, given the viewer's current predicted adaptation.