Samsung and Amazon Video announced an updated version of the open HDR10 standard, called HDR10+. The new version of the standard leverages dynamic metadata to produce enhanced contrast and colors. Wonder what kind of busy this will have at NAB next weel?
HDR10
The HDR10 standard describes a specification with better contrast and brightness, as well as a wider gamut of color, for TVs. It’s an open standard developed by the Consumer Technology Association, a standards and trade association for the consumer electronics industry in the United States.
HDR10 uses the newer Rec.2020 color space standard, which is larger than Adobe RGB and the DCI P3 digital cinema color spaces. As the HDR10 name implies, it also uses a bit depth of 10 bits, compared to the standard 8-bit color.
The HDR10 standard is supported by Samsung, LG, Sony, Sharp, Vizio, and Microsoft, as well as by Amazon Video and Netflix.
HDR10+
The HDR10+ update brings Dynamic Tone Mapping to the standard. The current HDR10 standard utilizes static metadata that remains fixed for the period of the video playback. This means that if a movie’s color scheme is bright overall, but some scenes are shot in dimmer light, they would appear darker than envisioned or intended.
The new HDR10+ standard adjusts the high-dynamic range of a movie scene by scene or even frame by frame, which should produce significantly better and more enjoyable results.
Samsung said that all of its 2017 UHD and QLED (Quantum Dot LED) TVs will be HDR10+ compatible. Its 2016 UHD TVs will also receive support for the new standard through a firmware update.
Partners
Amazon Video has been one of Samsung’s first partners in developing the HDR10 standard, and now the video streaming service is the first to adopt HDR+ as well.
“Together with Samsung, we are excited to offer customers an enhanced viewing experience on a broad range of devices,” said Greg Hart, Vice President of Amazon Video, worldwide.
“At Amazon, we are constantly innovating on behalf of customers and are thrilled to be the first streaming service provider to work with Samsung to make HDR10+ available on Prime Video globally later this year,” he added.
Samsung also previously partnered with Colorfront, a company that develops software for the motion picture industry, to improve HDR+ workflows for creative post-production mastering. The company also collaborated with MulticoreWare to integrate HDR10+ support in the x265 video codec, which is available under an open source license and used by many popular commercial encoding systems.
