Audio Video News

Samsung Announces New HDR Format, Streaming Deal with Amazon

SV Staff  |  Apr 21, 2017

Samsung and Amazon have announced a new standard for high dynamic range (HDR) content that “leverages dynamic metadata to produce enhanced contrast and colors on an expanded range of televisions.”

The standard, dubbed HDR10+, elevates the HDR10 open standard with the addition of Dynamic Tone Mapping, according to a press release issued earlier this week.

All of Samsung’s 2017 UHD TVs—including its flagship QLED TV lineup—support HDR10+ and in the second half of this year its 2016 UHD TVs will be upgraded to support HDR10+ through a firmware update. The TVs also support the standard HDR10 format but not the competing Dolby Vision HDR format.

The announcement also said Amazon will make HDR10+ content available on Prime Video later this year.

From the press release:

The current HDR10 standard utilizes static metadata that does not change during playback despite scene specific brightness levels. As a result, image quality may not be optimal in some scenes. For example, when a movie’s overall color scheme is very bright but has a few scenes filmed in relatively dim lighting, those scenes will appear significantly darker than what was originally envisioned by the director.

HDR10+ incorporates dynamic metadata that allows a high dynamic range (HDR) TV to adjust brightness levels on a scene-by-scene or even frame-by-frame basis. With the ability to display outstanding contrast with detailed highlights and a richer range of colors, HDR10+ produces images that are much closer to the director’s intent.

Samsung said it has partnered with other companies to establish an HDR10+ ecosystem. Previously, the company collaborated with Colorfront to improve HDR10+ workflows for post-production mastering and MulticoreWare to integrate HDR10+ support in x265 High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), which is available for free under an open source license and used by many commercial encoding system providers, including Telestream, Haivision, and Rohde and Schwarz, according to Samsung.

COMMENTS
jmilton7043's picture
Submitted by jmilton7043 on April 24, 2017 - 5:34am

HDR 10+ will still be a 10 bit format. Dolby Vision is 12 bit. Those bits are important for dynamic range and WCG. I'm hoping a current DV enable device will be able to get a SW upgrade for 10+

Rich67's picture
Submitted by Rich67 on April 24, 2017 - 9:49am

This is exactly what we need. Companies are still working to implement the 2 current standards. So let's throw a proprietary and obviously "?" much needed method into the mix.That's for what everyone has been clamoring. Another standard. Everyone was just asking for a method that only works with one manufacturer and one distributor. I'm almost positive that this will help improve things.

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