(Pocket-lint) – Samsung has announced that its HDR10+ picture standard will expand across games and IPTV services in the coming months.
Having already added the gaming-specific variant of HDR10+ to some of its own monitors and TVs released this year, other manufacturers and brands – such as Nvidia – are adopting it too. There is no indication yet from game developers on whether they will support HDR10+, but once the hardware is readily available, there’s no reason why not.
The rival HDR picture standard, Dolby Vision, is already supported on Xbox consoles and some games offer it as an option.
HDR10+ is an extension of the common HDR10 picture standard used by many games and movies. HDR (High Dynamic Range) technology enables a display to show a wider spectrum of colours, plus increased brightness and contrast, in comparison with standard images. However, with the normal HDR standard, picture metadata is applied for the entire piece of content, so while it looks more inolving and accurate, it doesn’t take into account the needs of different locations or scenes, say.
HDR10+ is more dynamic than that. It adapts the metadata on a frame-by-frame basis, ensuring that brighter scenes look more vibrant, while darker ones have deeper black levels, without crushing details. It is similar to Dolby Vision in that respect.
Nvidia recently announced that its latest RTX and GTX graphics cards will support HDR10+, while Apple is also supporting the standard on its new Apple TV 4K box (plus the Apple TV app on Samsung TVs).
Some other television manufacturers also offer HDR10+ on their sets, under licence from Samsung, such as Philips and Panasonic.
Writing by Rik Henderson.
