Most of Panasonic and Samsung’s 4K televisions from 2018 are now set to receive a firmware update that will push each respective display’s current HDR10 capabilities up to HDR10+ standards. That’s according to a recent announcement from HDR10+ Technologies, LLC, which is a joint venture between the two companies and 20th Century Fox. The change itself effectively improves on the original open standard by allowing advanced display chipsets to recreate lighting and, by proxy, color in scenes more closely to how film and content makers intended through the use of metadata. More directly, it enables additional metadata to be included on a frame-by-frame basis and then read by the chips found in advanced televisions. As a result, playback is much more dynamic while maintaining consistency from display to display. The TVs in question will receive the new functionality either through a firmware update or directly out of the box for new displays from the factory.
As of this writing, neither company has revealed exactly which televisions will receive the new software or provided a timeline with regard to when the update will arrive for those who already own the hardware. Not every set released by either company features support for HDR10 content, however, and it is probably safe to assume that is a prerequisite since the updated firmware builds on top of that. Setting that aside, 20th Century Fox also took advantage of the announcement to reveal that it plans to incorporate the standard by encoding its upcoming productions with HDR10+. Further announcements for what is included in that should be expected to begin rolling out over the next several weeks.
There isn’t currently much content that supports the standard but Amazon did begin rolling out HDR10+ support to its HDR Amazon Prime Video selection late last year. Several companies, including Panasonic, have released secondary accessory technologies such as Blu-ray players that also already support the feature. So at least some of the titles found through the service and some media players will already allow compliant HDR10+ content to be played at its full potential once the update arrives for Samsung and Panasonic’s televisions.