Two new Bravia TV models, the WF66 and RF45​, make Sony “the only TV manufacturer offering the benefits” of high dynamic range in its 1080p TV line, Sony U.K. boasted in a Thursday product announcement.. The claim -- with the footnote that it was accurate “according to Sony research as of 15 February 2018” -- was false, because Panasonic in Europe earlier announced that basic HDR10 will be built into even its entry-level 1080p TVs for 2018 (see 1802130024). Sony's WF66 and RF45 sets will support HDR10 and hybrid log-gamma HDR technologies, said a Sony U.K. spokeswoman Thursday. Asked if Sony stands by its claim that it's exclusively offering 1080p TVs with HDR support amid Panasonic's announcement of the same 1080p feature, the spokeswoman said: "We do not comment on other brands." However, toward the end of the day Thursday, Sony deleted the exclusivity claim and the footnote from the Bravia TV announcement. Panasonic representatives didn’t comment. TV makers for several years have openly pondered building HDR functionality into 1080p sets (see 1509030014), and now is that feature combination making its way into commercial reality with 2018 products. Judging from the competitive jockeying already seen between Panasonic and Sony, it bears watching to see if HDR becomes a differentiating feature in 1080p TV product lines. Bandwidth constraints have many broadcasters looking toward using 1080p with HDR in launching ATSC 3.0, at least as an “interim” approach, several said at an ATSC conference in May (see 1705160044).

Panasonic is using an “HDR -- Multi HDR Support” logo to denote HDR10, hybrid log-gamma and HDR10+ high-dynamic-range functionality in its 2018 TV line, the company said Tuesday at its annual pan-European convention, held this year in Palma, Mallorca, to mark the company’s 100th birthday. Panasonic -- one of the “3C” HDR10+ consortium companies with Fox and Samsung -- is describing HDR10+ as “dynamic metadata technology.” Panasonic product demonstrator Michael Price said his company is “confident,” based on working prototypes already available, that HDR10+ will be available either on sets out of the box or as a firmware upgrade by late April or early May. The 3C consortium fashioned an HDR10+ logo and applied to register it as a certification mark just before CES, but licensing terms for the royalty-free platform haven’t been finalized (see 1801130001). All Panasonic 4K TVs for 2018 will have HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG, and basic HDR10 even will be built into entry-level 1080p LCD TVs, the company said. No Panasonic TVs will have Dolby Vision, extending the company’s recent practice of shunning that royalty-bearing HDR platform (see 1708280018). Demos of HDR10+ used clips from Fox movies Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Kingsman, Wonder Woman and Alien Covenant. We saw one comparison demonstration of HDR10 versus HDR10+, but it used nature footage rather than movies. We witnessed no demo of HDR10+ versus Dolby Vision. Panasonic is building Dolby Vision into some Ultra HD Blu-ray players because “some people” want it, the company said. Those Ultra HD Blu-ray players also will support HDR10+, the company said.

HDR10+ got a thumbs down at the annual Sony dealer and news-media show at its European headquarters in Weybridge, south of London, last week. Training Manager Mike Somerset told us that “HDR10+ is not a format we will be looking at.” Somerset fleshed out details of Sony’s policy on HDR, including Dolby Vision. All new Sony TVs except the most basic 32-inch set will come with HDR10 out of the box, he said. Beginning this spring, Dolby Vision capability will be standard in XF90, AF8, A1 and ZD9 series sets packing the X1 Extreme Processor -- either embedded or as a free software update -- said the company. The X1 Extreme chip set controls local dimming, adds HD-to-4K upscaling and processes 24/25/30 frame-per-second content for 100 Hz displays, said the company. It's now routine to insert full-screen black frames between the image frames to smooth upscaled motion on a 100 Hz panel, Somerset’s team told us, but that reduces overall brightness because the viewer’s eye is seeing less light overall. To compensate, Sony’s local dimming control boosts screen brightness in select areas of the image, they said. Asked whether the technology will work with HDR, when the display already is being driven to peak brightness in select areas, Sony would say only that “it does work with HDR.”

Sony is using CES to showcase a prototype of its “X1 Ultimate” processor for future TVs, said CEO Kazuo Hirai at Sony’s Monday pre-CES news conference. The X1 Ultimate has twice the “real-time processing power” of Sony’s existing X1 Extreme processor, he said. X1 Ultimate “optimizes and delivers unprecedented picture quality, whether it’s for a 4K, 8K, LCD or an OLED panel,” he said. At Sony’s CES booth, the X1 Ultimate prototype “processes 8K HDR in real time” at up to 10,000 nits of peak brightness, he said.

Funai, which is exclusively licensed to sell Philips TVs in North America, will build Technicolor’s high-dynamic-range technology into 2019-model sets for the U.S. market “in conjunction with” the anticipated late-2018 launch of ATSC 3.0, the company said in a Monday announcement. Funai representatives didn’t comment on whether Technicolor’s will be the exclusive HDR technology built into the sets. The reference to 3.0 is peculiar because ATSC announced a year ago that 3.0 would have dual support for hybrid log-gamma and perceptual quantization HDR transfer functions but is agnostic on specific HDR technology implementations (see 1701190059). The presence of Philips TVs embedded with Technicolor HDR “reflects the importance of delivering high quality HDR or SDR to any screen regardless of specific formats,” and “strengthens the link between two leading brands in video -- Technicolor and Philips,” said Frederic Guillanneuf, Philips head-HDR business development, in a statement. Philips and Technicolor announced an agreement at CES two years ago to merge their HDR technologies (see 1601040051). LG announced before CES it’s building the Technicolor HDR technology into its 2018 TVs “in anticipation of new content being released in that format in the coming year,” though it regards Dolby Vision as the “hallmark” of HDR formats (see 1801020031).

AudioControl added support for Dolby Vision high dynamic range in its line of AV receivers and preamplifier/processors, said the company Thursday. Sales of HDR-capable displays are expected to grow 300 percent over the next four years, making support of a “premium” HDR technology like Dolby Vision “a natural" for the company, said Chris Kane, AudioControl's vice president-sales.

Global shipments of high-dynamic-range TVs will grow to 47.9 million sets in 2021 from 12.2 million this year, said IHS Markit in a Monday forecast. IHS also sees an additional 88.6 million HDR-ready sets shipping globally in 2021, it said. It defined those sets as having HDR decoding embedded, but no HDR display capability. IHS expects 23 percent of the Ultra HD TVs that ship globally this year to “offer the full HDR experience," said Paul Gray, associate director-consumer devices, in a statement. Most of the sets shipped “will be able to decode a signal, but lack the high contrast capability to display HDR content to an advantage,” he said. In areas of the world “where the airwaves are congested, broadcasters have no spare space to transmit the extra data required” for 4K, said Gray. “However, HD with HDR provides a huge increase in perceived quality for a very low data overhead, and that’s incredibly interesting.” U.S. broadcasters see ATSC 3.0 as the gateway for delivering better pictures to the viewing public almost immediately after launch, but bandwidth constraints have many looking toward using 1080p with “enhancements” like HDR in launching 3.0, at least as an “interim” approach, broadcasters told ATSC’s annual meeting in May (see 1705160044). North America will lead the world with 14.6 million HDR sets shipping in 2021, with China second at 11.8 million TVs shipped, IHS said.

Panasonic, which is partnering with Samsung and Fox in the HDR10+ licensing consortium announced just before IFA (see 1708280018), has been probing ways to avert the practical problems that predictably will occur as the content industry moves gradually from standard dynamic range to HDR, a recently published U.S. patent application shows. TV sets will need to deal on the fly with whatever signals are thrown at them, especially an unpredictable mix of video and graphics, from separate TV and data channels, in both SDR and HDR, said the application (20170311034), filed in June and published Oct. 26 at the Patent and Trademark Office. In the application, two inventors from the Panasonic Intellectual Property Management Co. office in Osaka say research found "various problems occurring in a conventionally unexpected environment” where SDR and HDR graphics need to be displayed simultaneously with SDR and HDR video. Viewers risk “visual discomfort” from that mix, especially when the different signals are differently switching between SDR and HDR, says the application. One way to make TV images more "eye friendly” is to transmit metadata that codes the appropriate opto-electrical and electro-optical transfer functions for the data and video signal where it's needed, it says. Where the video and data functions are different, the metadata can just code the “offset” or difference between them, it says. A suitably equipped TV set will then smoothly adjust the picture and graphics dynamic ranging so there are no eye-jarring effects on screen, it says. It's unclear from the application whether existing HDR TV sets could be modified with software updates to handle data graphics in this way, nor does the application speculate when a new generation of more graphics-friendly TV sets will become available. Panasonic representatives didn't comment.

Samsung applied Wednesday to register the trademark “HDR Elite” for a class of TVs, monitors and digital signage products, Patent and Trademark Office records show. Samsung filed a similar application a day earlier at the EU Intellectual Property Office, agency records reveal. Samsung representatives didn’t comment Monday on how the company plans to use the trademark commercially, including whether “HDR Elite” is the name chosen for the HDR10+ open high-dynamic-range platform, licensing of which Samsung, Panasonic and Fox said at IFA would begin in January on a royalty-free basis (see 1709050030).

On the touchy subject of Disney backing high dynamic range for use with 1080p rather than 4K content material, the studio sees it as a viable strategy for its legacy titles, Sam Johnson, senior manager-technology and systems for Disney in the U.K., told a MESA (Media & Entertainment Services Alliance) Europe conference Wednesday in London. Disney for nearly two years has dodged questions about its ambitions for pairing HDR with 1080p, and Johnson in Q&A left little doubt it remains a sensitive issue inside the studio. “We’re working for Disney so we have to be very careful what we say,” said Johnson. “A lot of hardware companies are looking at HDR, but not just 4K HDR as a value-added product.” HDR content with 4K resolution “costs a lot to create, so looking at HD HDR as a potential standard, touted as Advanced HDR, is going to be a very interesting proposition for us for a lot of our library,” he said. Johnson emphasized the company believes 4K HDR is “here to stay,” and “we can now bookmark it as part of the standards.” Disney, a founding member of the UHD Alliance, worries “there is definitely a lack of standardization that potentially hinders adoption” of HDR, said Johnson. “There are a lot of HDR formats out there. I know the companies don’t like to think of it as a format war but there is definitely a lack of standardization that needs to be addressed.” Prompted to explain challenges posed by the diversity of HDR formats, Johnson listed HDR10, HDR10+ and Dolby Vision, and said: “We need to create different versions for them all.” The company needs to “partner up with Samsung on HDR10+” because Amazon is one of the studio’s “biggest” electronic sell-through partners, and “Amazon has said they will leverage HDR10+ as a standard” (see 1708280018), he said. “So we need to know how to provide HDR10+, especially when price points are going to be the same. That’s where our frustrations lie.”