HDR FORMATS YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT

The past couple of years has seen a number of different HDR formats emerge. Here’s how they differ

HDR10: THE BASELINE

HDR10 is the minimum HDR standard you should look for. It’s the most widely available, and also includes support for 10bit colour and wide colour gamut, meaning images using it have more vibrant hues, as well as better brightness management. Image performance is solid, but it uses static metadata, meaning dark and brightness levels are set for the whole video – see the next box for why that’s a bit basic. A new version, HDR10+, is on the way to fix that.

DOLBY VISION: THE PREMIUM CONTENDER

Dolby Vision includes everything from HDR10 along with nice extras, such as dynamic metadata and 12-bit colour. The former offers scene-by-scene HDR mastering, meaning instead of a brightness level being set based on an average of the whole movie (which is how HDR10 works), it changes depending on the needs of each scene. The latter offers more gradients of colour within an image, meaning less ‘banding’ of colour on complex objects.

HYBRID LOG GAMMA: BROADCAST READY

HDR10 and Dolby Vision are all well and good, but their reliance on metadata (extra data attached to the video) to tell the TV how best to display scenes means they can’t be used for broadcast television. Enter Hybrid Log Gamma (HLG), a standard developed by the BBC which will eventually be used to add HDR detail to broadcast telly… eventually. A large number of TV makers already support it in their 2017-and-later models, though.