At IFA 2017, the UHD Alliance announced that the ‘UHD Premium’ certification and logo is being expanded to include streaming media players, set-top boxes, and desktop PCs. This is to ensure a good HDR experience.
Look for the UHD Premium logo
The ‘Ultra HD Premium’ – or ‘UHD Premium’ – certification program was announced in January 2016 as an industry initiative to ensure a good HDR viewing experience. To carry the ‘UHD Premium’ logo any given TV must first meet a set of criteria.
The certification program has since been expanded to cover UHD Blu-ray players and later laptops, tablets and phones. At IFA, the alliance announced that it is now adding streaming media players, set-top boxes, and desktop PCs to the program so expect to see the logo on certified players soon.
- "With 4K UHD TV shipments increasing by 42 percent, to 81 million in 2017, the one constant in a continually and rapidly changing content delivery environment is the consumer demand for a premium content experience regardless of the delivery platform," said Michael Zink, UHD Alliance chairman. "To that end, whether they are viewing content delivered by a disc player, cable or satellite box, or a streaming media player, they can look for the Ultra HD Premium logo to identify products that deliver a premium experience in 4K UHD with HDR."
Media players and PCs must meet the same basic requirements as TVs and UHD Blu-ray players today, meaning end-to-end 4K resolution, 10-bit colors, BT.2020 color space, and HDR output (PQ).
Also read: List: Best HDR TVs
Product testing will begin this fall.
The group has also started monitoring interoperability issues that consumers have experienced when connecting players to 4K HDR-capable TVs. The goal is to include interoperability as part of the certification work. Today, many HDR-capable TVs require that you manually activate HDMI setting options to enjoy HDR content via HDMI.