Earlier this year, Amazon and Samsung partnered to announce HDR10+, a new High Dynamic Range (HDR) video format that built on the original HDR10, offering features more similar to the competing Dolby Vision. Now Samsung TV owners will finally get a chance to see the new format, with around 100 titles coming to Amazon Prime Video, according to Yonhap News.
You won’t have to wait long either, with the titles scheduled to arrive on the service on December 13. The full list of titles isn’t yet available, but a number of high-profile Amazon titles including The Grand Tour, The Tick, and The Man in the High Castle are reported to be among those adding HDR10+ support. Amazon plans to add more titles in the future.
The original HDR10 standard uses simple metadata that only allows brightness to be set for an entire video. Dolby Vision, on the other hand, allowed for metadata on a per-scene or even per-frame basis, meaning that brightness and other video details could be adjusted for the best results throughout and entire show. HDR10+ adds Dynamic Tone Mapping, allowing for adjusting metadata per scene or per frame, just like Dolby Vision. Unlike Dolby Vision, though, HDR10+ is an open standard, meaning TV manufacturers don’t have to pay to license it.
Samsung says that all of its 2017 UHD TVs, including its premium QLED TVs, support the new HDR10+ standard. There’s good news if you bought a Samsung TV last year, too, as Samsung’s 2016 UHD TVs got support for HDR10+ via a firmware update released over the summer.
When it comes to content, Amazon Video is the first major video service to provide HDR10+ programming. Samsung has also partnered with MulticoreWare to integrate HDR10+ into the x265 High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) codec, which is used in many commercial encoding systems, making it easier for video providers to offer the new standard. The Netflix senior product manager of its partner ecosystem, Richard Smith, recently told TechRadar that the service would possibly be open to supporting HDR10+ in the future, but this is not currently planned.
HDR10+ is far from the only HDR standard available, so if you’re feeling a little confused, we’ve taken a look at the various formats and how they compare to each other.