You may have seen the news that Netflix is adding HDR10+ support to certain titles now and hopes to have all titles supported by the end of the year. It’s a headline that reads like a cool new feature is coming to all of Netflix’s customers. But the reality is that nobody but Samsung TV owners need to care. Of course, as the number one seller of TVs in the world, Samsung has a lot of TVs in homes that will have Netflix looking just a tiny bit more sparkling.
Why only Samsung TV owners? The answer requires a bit of historical context.
Samsung is currently the only TV brand shunning Dolby and its version of HDR, called Dolby Vision. If you own any of the best TVs from Sony, LG, TCL, or Hisense TV — not to mention any number of other more budget oriented TV brands, like Toshiba, Sansui, Roku, or Amazon’s Fire TV — then you have Dolby Vision support built right into your TV. And even if your TV also supports HDR10+, when you visit Netflix and watch a title that’s available in HDR, you’ll be getting it in Dolby Vision, whether that’s your preference or not.
That’s because Dolby Vision is the default HDR format delivered to Dolby Vision enabled TVs by Netflix, and there’s no reason to believe that’s going to change any time soon, if ever.
Samsung, however, has been steadfast in its objection to Dolby Vision support since the HDR format rolled out. Samsung has made precious few official statements regarding its anti-Dolby Vision stance, leaving pundits like myself to surmise that Samsung doesn’t care to pay Dolby’s licensing fees and prefers not to have an outside entity dictate how its TVs operate. Since the advent of HDR10+, Samsung has stood by the fact that it is every bit as good as Dolby Vision and brings great value and experiences to its customers.
And it is indeed true that HDR10+ does provide an outstanding experience. Like Dolby Vision, HDR10+ improves on plain-vanilla HDR10 by providing scene-by-scene instructions for brightness and color through dynamic metadata in a video signal. The improvement over standard HDR isn’t always readily apparent, but it can be quite noticeable in especially bright or especially dark scenes, where subtle variations in bright highlights and/or shadow detail can make or break a scene.
Proponents of Dolby Vision — myself included — tend to favor Dolby Vision HDR on TVs with limited brightness potential, or in cases where content creators used the Dolby Vision production pipeline with intention. In the case of the former, Dolby Vision processing understands a TVs limitations and can optimize picture quality to fit within the limitations of that TV. In the case of the latter, content creators can optimize every frame of video to look stellar on nearly any TV.
Unfortunately, the Dolby Vision ecosystem is rarely used to its full potential. In fact, many Hollywood color graders and video production professionals I speak to say they’ve only begun to explore Dolby Vision’s potential themsleves, often due to budget and/or time constraints.
That being the case, it is a rare instance in which the average viewer could identify the difference between a title played back in HDR10+ vs. a title played back in Dolby Vision. In fact, which format ends up looking better tends to be a toss-up, which is why I don’t personally scold Samsung incessantly for not supporting Dolby Vision in my reviews of its televisions.
Perhaps the best news to come from Netflix’s announcement around HDR10+ support — aside from being a boon to Samsung TV owners — is that other streaming services may follow suit, if they haven’t already.
