It was revealed a few weeks ago but Samsung has now announced that HDR10+ in the Netflix app will be available on its smart TVs and monitors starting today (April 4th).
The addition of HDR10+ will help to further optimise the picture on best Samsung TVs, offering “richer contrast, deeper colours and stunning visual depth”.
One of the main drawbacks with format HDR10+ has its lack of support on streaming platforms and 4K Blu-ray, but it has slowly started to build some momentum, no doubt helped by the fact the Samsung is one of the chief backers behind the HDR10+ format.
HDR10+ works in a similar way to its Dolby Vision HDR rival, automatically adjusting the brightness and contrast levels to ensure that each frame produces the best image the TV is capable of.
HDR10+ content on Netflix will be available on 2025 Samsung Neo QLED, OLED and lifestyle TVs, and they’ll be support for it on Samsung’s 2024 and 2025 monitor models.
A Netflix post on Medium indicated that HDR10+ is being added to any device that supports the AV1 codec, so we’d expect HDR10+ support to appear on smartphones and tablets that support the AV1 codec. If you have a Samsung TV going back to 2021, you should be able to enjoy HDR10+ in the Netflix app.
To watch content in HDR10+, you must be a subscriber to Netflix’ Premium plan, which allows access to 4K, HDR and Dolby Atmos sound.
Samsung will never support Dolby Vision
It’s been a while but HDR10+ might actually being getting somewhere in the AV space. The Apple TV+ app on Samsung TVs supports HDR10+ and now so does the Netflix app.
HDR10+ has always had Dolby Vision to contend with, and despite this increased support for HDR10+ from Netflix, I suspect they’d still prefer you watch in Dolby Vision. In fact, the wording on Netflix’s press release reads as if any device that was previously streaming in HDR10 gets the boost of HDR10+, but they aren’t going to put HDR10+ above Dolby Vision considering Dolby’s HDR format is how filmmakers want you to experience their films and TV shows.
And this does make it abundantly clear that Samsung has no intention of supporting Dolby Vision any time soon. It would be nice if they did, but Samsung has its own views on picture quality and it doesn’t want to be told by Dolby how it should look.
Which is so odd to me, because Dolby Vision is how the filmmakers want it to look.
