Samsung’s newly announced Galaxy Note 9 and a number of other Android devices received Netflix HDR certificates earlier this week, with one of the world’s most popular on-demand streaming services expanding its mobile HDR portfolio by five new names in total. Besides Samsung’s latest Android flagship, the company’s list of HDR-certified devices now also includes the Galaxy Tab S4 tablet, Honor 10, and this year’s high-end smartphones from LG – the G7 ThinQ and V35 ThinQ.
As was the case before, only a portion of the Netflix library actually supports HDR playback, with shows and movies that do being designated with a prominent HDR badge attached to their thumbnails. Likewise, you’ll still need a Netflix Ultra HD subscription in order to actually stream HDR video on your mobile device of choice. Netflix has been gradually adding HDR support to its original content in recent times, with its high-dynamic-range ecosystem now including the likes of Stranger Things, The Do Over, Marvel’s Daredevil, MindHunter, War Machine, Samurai Gourmet, Death Note, and The OA. The on-demand video platform also expanded its list of HD-certified devices, having awarded approvals to Huawei’s MediaPad M5 10 Lite and T5 10 lineups, and Nova 3, in addition to the five aforementioned Android devices.
While the majority of Samsung’s recent flagships are fully compatible with HDR content on Netflix, the Galaxy S8 lineup isn’t among them and the reasons for that remain unclear to this date. The upcoming Galaxy S10 series is widely expected to be the first Samsung-made smartphone family to offer HDR recording capabilities in addition to playback. While most 2018 flagships equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 can already do HDR capture, Samsung‘s Exynos 9810 used in the international variants of the Galaxy S9, Galaxy S9 Plus, and the Galaxy Note 9 can’t, which presumably prompted the company to disable the functionality on the U.S. models as well for the sake of feature parity.