HDR10+ Certification Begins This Month
My 2 Cents
Did we need another standard that currently brings no tangible benefits to the viewer, as of yet? It doesn’t provide you with anything more, and a little less, than Dolby Vision (DV). True its not proprietary, and true it’s an essentially a free technology that any manufacture can easily license and include in their product. However, will that free license actually translate into any financial or visual benefits to the consumer, and will it create just more confusion as the user tries to determine whether or not they need it? This is ignoring the fact that most existing UHD players and many flat panel displays cannot be upgraded to support this standard. Oppo maybe the only player able to be upgraded, if their hardware can support the processing requirements, and if, despite them winding down, they decide to provide what has always been, legendary and ongoing feature and firmware support.
Maybe this licensing of HDR10+ will force Dolby to reduce their license fees to stay competitive. But again, will the consumer benefit financially? Remember that innovation isn’t free, and Dolby has been on the innovative cutting edge of both audio and video high quality developments for decades. Riding “on the back” of another companies innovation and releasing comments like “The HDR10+ platform was also designed to allow for future development and innovation in order to deliver a more powerful technology in the years to come” , is no guarantee of anything, let alone the complete lack of any specifics. New innovations and developments cost money, and somebody (the consumer) always has to pay for them one way or another; through hardware, firmware or media.
Is this just yet another ploy by the manufactures, to get you, the consumer, to buy yet another display and player!!
HDR10+ Certication Program
The HDR10+ license and logo is available to AV products (such as TVs, Ultra HD Blu-ray players, set-top boxes and 4K Blu-ray discs) that meet the HDR10+ technical and testing specifications – so it’s likely that we will soon see the HDR10+ badge on product packaging.
HDR10+ is an open format created as an alternative to Dolby Vision. While the HDR10+ license is open and free (unlike Dolby Vision) there is an annual administration fee that companies have to pay. According to the license program overview, it is between $2,500 and $10,000 depending upon the product. For content companies, such as Amazon, there is no fee. No surprise there!
Samsung and Panasonic already sell HDR10+ certified TVs, and players are close behind. Starting this month other companies can join the fray. Supposedly over 40 companies have now signed on to the program.
This new format was created by Samsung but has now been transferred to a joint venture known as HDR10+ Technologies. Other members of the group include; 20th Century Fox, and Panasonic. Additional companies that intend to support the alliance are said to include Warner Bros, Phillips TV’s and Amazon.
The HDR10+ technology is very similar to that deployed by Dolby. It employs dynamic metadata to provide tone mapping that can change both scene to scene and frame to frame brightness, color saturation and contrast. Both formats are backward compatible to the HDR10 UHD base layer that does not use dynamic metadata.
As of now there are few HDR10+ displays on the market and only Panasonic is due to release players that can support this new standard. Companies like Sony, LG, Vizio, Loewe, TCL and others all currently include DV in their displays. It will be very interesting to see if they jump onto the HDR10+ train and release dual standard sets.
Currently there are no 4K UHD discs encoded to support this new standard. Let’s hope that discs that support both DV and HDR10+, will actually playback on existing hardware.
Home Theater Projectors
For all those projector lovers out there, like myself, neither of these standards bring you any benefits. Both are directly aimed at fixed flat panel displays that have to meet very specific technical standards in order to be licensed. The inclusion of these technologies into a projector are highly unlikely due to the complexities of getting them to work correctly with display devices that have widely varying and unpredictable characteristics when setup for a given environment.
