ARM joins Samsung’s hdr10+ alliance

British processor designer ARM joins HDR10+ Technologies, a joint venture of Samsung, Panasonic and film company 20th Century Fox. The alliance consists of companies that commit to support the hdr10+ standard.

Samsung reports that the British ARM has now also joined the ‘hdr10+ network’. With the entry of ARM, this HDR standard in the field of mobile chips and devices will probably be more widely supported. Qualcomm also supports hdr10+ with the Snapdragon 855-soc unveiled in December.

The hdr10+ alliance of Samsung, Panasonic and 20th Century Fox now consists of 45 members, who indicate that they will support the hdr10+ standard with their products. The Chinese electronics company TCL and Hisense have now also joined, although for the time being this only seems to affect the Chinese market. Samsung plans to build an HDR10+ test center in China for these parties, among others. Such centers are already in South Korea, Japan and the US.

Samsung is the driving force behind the hdr10+ standard and has been trying to get companies to participate in the program since August 2017 by, for example, not charging royalties for the use of hdr10+. This sets the company against Dolby Labs, which does charge a fee for Dolby Vision. In addition to Samsung, Panasonic and 20th Century Fox, companies such as Warner Bros and TP Vision are also participants.

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. This means that the brightness and tone mapping are not fixed for an entire film. Filmmakers can set this per scene or even per frame. On paper, Dolby Vision has 12-bit color reproduction and a maximum brightness of 10,000 cd/m², although the current Dolby Vision implementation is 10-bit, just like hdr10+.