Samsung and Panasonic add HDR10+ to 2018 TV models

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Hdr10+ Technologies, a joint venture of Samsung, Panasonic and film company 20th Century Fox, has announced that a number of television models from the two electronics manufacturers have received a firmware update that adds HDR10+ support.

HDR10+ technologies does not report which televisions have received the update, but Panasonic reports that it has added HDR10+ support to the “majority of 4k TVs released in 2018” via a firmware update. Samsung says that the majority of its own TVs released in 2018 will be fully certified for HDR10+. The South Korean manufacturer reports that it is working with other companies that support HDR10+ to help them develop tools and socs so that the TVs support HDR10+.

According to the joint venture, more than 80 companies have already signed up for the hdr10+ licensing program. Samsung is the driving force behind the hdr10+ standard and has been trying to get companies to participate in the program since August 2017, for example by not asking royalties. In addition to Samsung, Panasonic and 20th Century Fox, companies such as Warner Bros and TP Vision are also on board.

HDR10+ is Samsung’s counterpart to Dolby Vision. Both HDR standards are more advanced than the widespread HDR10, in the sense that they do not support static but dynamic metadata. That means brightness and tone mapping are not fixed for an entire movie; filmmakers can set this per scene. With HDR10, for example, dark scenes in movies with a lot of bright images can look too dark; dynamic metadata can prevent this by adjusting the information per scene.

For the time being, Dolby Vision is much more dominant than hdr10+. Netflix, among others, supports this HDR standard from Dolby Labs and there are already a number of UHD Blu-ray films that also support Dolby Vision in addition to HDR10. Furthermore, it is available on a large number of movies played on Apple TV 4K media player. In July, it turned out that the Xbox One S and X will eventually also receive Dolby Vision support. HDR10+ is currently only available for all HDR content on video service Amazon Prime.

There are a number of differences between Dolby Vision and HDR10+. Unlike HDR10+, Dolby Vision supports 12-bit color reproduction and a maximum brightness of 10,000 cd/m². Samsung’s standard does not go beyond 4000 cd/m². In theory, this makes Dolby Vision more future-proof, although the current OLED TVs do not yet exceed 1000 cd/m² and, for example, Samsung’s Q7 television achieves a maximum of 1500 cd/m².

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