Samsung and Amazon come with HDR10 + standard

Samsung presents a new open standard for HDR: HDR10+. It is an extension of the existing HDR10 standard with dynamic instead of static metadata. Amazon will use the standard for its streaming video service.

Samsung’s entire UHDTV line this year can already handle HDR10+ and last year’s UHD models will receive support in the second half of 2017 via a firmware update. Samsung reports that it is working with more parties than Amazon for HDR10+ content, but the company does not name names. It is also not clear whether other manufacturers are behind the standard.

All major TV manufacturers support the open HDR10 standard and products such as the PS4, Xbox One and Chromecast can also handle HDR10. This makes the support much wider than with the competing Dolby Vision. The expansion now announced by Samsung should eliminate one of the disadvantages of HDR10 compared to Dolby Vision.

HDR10 only supports static metadata and not dynamic ones. With static metadata, tone mapping is established and the averages and limits in terms of brightness for an entire film, for example from 0 to 1000cd/m2. In films with a lot of bright images, scenes with low light can therefore look darker than the director intended, Samsung describes it. With dynamic metadata, the averages and boundaries can be determined on a scene-by-scene and even frame-by-frame basis, so that the representation should be more faithful.