The next battle in the Format Wars is heating up as the first film studio has committed to a particular successor to Blu-ray. 20th Century Fox has announced that all of their future film releases will be released in Ultra High Definition (UHD) with High Dynamic Range (HDR). With the prevalence of 4K televisions on the rise, Fox has set the bar for everyone to follow suit. They will also remaster recent releases in UHD/HDR such as X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST and THE MAZE RUNNER.
While there is a group known as the UHD Alliance who are working on determining the agreed upon specifications for HDR amongst all studios, Fox’s decision to begin the process will potentially compete with Dolby’s Dolby Vision HDR format which Vizio is set to begin manufacturing televisions with. To be clear, these decisions are specific to the home video market. Theater-owners are still a long way from adopting this technology for theater use, although IMAX is beta testing it already.
The gap in digital quality is shrinking at a quicker pace than ever before. Not even twenty years ago, the shift from VHS to DVD led to the demise of the video store. Then, Blu-ray and HD-DVD duked it out for supremacy and now there are some calling the time of death on movies on any form of physical media. With TVs beginning to showcase film better than some movie theaters, the cinematic experience is changing faster than the industry can keep up with it.
There is still no clear answer on what HDR will mean for the common consumer, but expect more news like this to follow over the next few years.
