The group behind ‘HDR10+’ is ramping things up a gear and has announced that upcoming 2018 Panasonic and Samsung TVs will have HDR10+ firmware. Member company 20th Century Fox is also about to start encoding upcoming films with the technology.
Whilst some may think it’s a case of ‘too little, too late’ for HDR10+ to make a tangible impact on Dolby Vision’s dominance in the HDR sphere, it does have some industry powerhouses backing it – Panasonic, Samsung have and 20th Century Fox to name a few.
It has been confirmed that certain 4K TVs from Samsung and Panasonic will soon offer HDR10+ support, offering what the former describes as more tailor-made HDR performance suited to a TV’s specific capabilities – i.e. allowing for brightness and colour levels to be adjusted on a frame-by-frame basis.
In terms of the finer details of what TV will support HDR10+, both manufacturers say the majority of their respective 2018 lines will – if not built-in then via firmware updates.
The key point of difference between regular HDR10 and HDR10+ and Dolby Vision is that the latter two use dynamic (rather than fixed) metadata pre-encoded into scenes. Although the Dolby standard supports super-bright TVs and provides up to 12-bit colour depth (rather than 10), cost is a major factor driving the push for HDR10+, a royalty-free alternative (though, there is an admin fee) to the significant costs of supporting Dolby Vision.
This is all well and good you may say but what about actual content? The HDR10+ group say “20th Century Fox has committed to incorporating HDR10+ in its upcoming new release slate .. and plans to announce availability in the coming weeks” – watch this space for this, and further updates from Warner Bros too, on putting the capabilities of these upcoming TVs to good use.