Oppo To Support HDR10+
It is now strongly rumored that Oppo is going to support the new HDR10+ standard through a firmware upgrade. This is excellent news and shows Oppos’ continued promised support for their player owners, despite the company now no longer manufacturing or selling any players.
Quote: “OPPO Digital is pleased to announce that we are now a current adopter of the HDR10+ license and technology. To show our continued support for our valued users, we will be exploring the ability to add support to our line of UDP 4K players in a forthcoming firmware update.”
These rumors seem to be bolstered by similar rumors regarding the Cambridge Audio CXUHD player which is a rebadged Oppo 203 and is still being sold by Cambridge Audio.
What is HDR10+?
HDR10+ is an open format created as an alternative to Dolby Vision. The HDR10+ license is open and free (unlike Dolby Vision) but there is an annual administration fee that companies have to pay.
Samsung and Panasonic already sell HDR10+ certified TVs, and players are close behind.
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 only four 4K UHD discs and over 100 Amazon streamed titles that support HDR10+. Let’s hope that discs supporting both DV and HDR10+, will actually playback on all existing 4K players.
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.
See here for the Oppo Facebook announcement.
See here for the Oppo Twitter announcment.
See here for the HDR10+ alliance web site.
See here for the HDR10+ license program web site.
