If you needed a bit more confirmation of Roku’s all-new 2016 lineup, the streaming pioneer just published a support note confirming three of the five incoming models: the Premiere, Premiere+, and Ultra. They’ve also confirmed HDR will be available on a subset of devices and kindly explains why compatible 4K television set owners should care.
HDR (High Dynamic Range) improves picture quality by expanding the range of both color and contrast of any image. In more simple terms, in any scene, details that are typically lost in the brightest and darkest areas in a scene will have more details. Wide Color Gamut goes further to expand the number of shades for each color to provide richer color depth, resulting in colors that are more true-to-life.
As to the flavor of HDR, Roku indicates they’re going with the Sony- and Samsung-backed HDR10 over Dolby Vision.
The new Roku Premiere+ and Roku Ultra models support HDR-10 standard. Your existing High Speed HDMI®cable that is working will continue to work However, you will need to connect the Roku Premiere+ and Roku Ultra into the HDMI 2.0a port for HDCP 2.2.
Unfortunately, Roku appears to contradict themselves… So, while it seems 100% likely that the Premiere+ (Roku 3-equiv) and Ultra (Roku 4-eqiv) will render HDR video, it’s not clear if the Premiere (Roku 2-quiv) will. In any event, with the publication of this support note, we must be getting real close to an official reveal.