Samsung and Panasonic are the first manufacturers to plug HDR10+ support into their TVs, and select 2018 models have reportedly already had the required firmware update deployed.

“The majority of our 2018 4K models are now HDR10+ certified,” says director of Panasonic’s TV division Toshiharu Tsutsui.

This marks a new act in the war between Dolby Vision and HDR10+. It’s a bit like VHS vs Betamax or Blu-ray vs HD-DVD, except even fewer people understand the difference.

Dolby Vision is a high dynamic range video format, and so are HDR10 and HDR10+. The general consensus found Dolby Vision was better than original HDR10, so Samsung’s HDR10+ was born. 20th Century Fox and Panasonic have since partnered-up with Samsung to give the format more clout.

Home cinema purists may still prefer Dolby Vision. While Vision and HDR10+ both use frame-by-frame metadata to tell the TV how to interpret the scene within its own capabilities, Dolby Vision supports greater colour depth and a higher maximum brightness ceiling.

In other words, it can grade content for screens so bright and colourful they can’t, or at least don’t, exist yet. Dolby Vision supports max brightness of 10,000 nits and 12-bit colour. HDR10+ supports 10-bit colour and 4,000-nit grading.

Both Dolby Vision and HDR10+ have the capability to deliver content better than our current TVs can truly handle. So let’s just hope this rivalry sorts itself out before too many of us end up with TVs whose HDR capabilities end up redundant.