The next battle in TV technologies continues apace as HDR10+, the HDR standard developed Samsung, Panasonic, 20th Century Fox and Amazon, gets a licensing and logo certification program.

HDR10+ is described as the open and royalty-free HDR alternative to Dolby Vision. It promises enhanced contrast and colours on TVs, with technology based on the SMPTE 2094-40 standard. The technology optimises 4K UHD display quality by using dynamic tone mapping to reflect frame to frame or scene to scene variations in brightness, colour saturation and contrast.

The standard does have one handicap compared to Dolby Vision-- it uses a 10-bit colour palette, compared to the 12-bit palette Dolby Vision uses.

TP Vision, the current holder of the Philips brand for TVs, announces a "multi-year exclusive partnership" with Bowers & Wilkins-- one promising to bring about "new reference visual and audio performance standards" in TVs.

The partnership has the two companies share engineering resources to "design and develop a long series of ground-breaking products" based on bespoke technologies. The two companies will also share engineering localities, with TP Vision currently holding an Innovation Centre in Ghent, Belgium while Bowers & Wilkins has recently expanded its UK-based R&D base.

Loewe adds another size option to the entry-level Bild TV series-- the Bild 3.65 is a 65-inch OLED set from the German company complete with built-in soundbar and Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG support.

Available in either graphite or light gray acoustic fabric options, the Bild 3.65 sits on an aluminium stand customers can swap for a table stand. Installers can also mount the TV on walls or floors. Either way, like the other Bild models the 3.65 is very slim (at just 4.6mm), and hides all cables behind magnetic covers on the back and sides to ensure a clean installation.

The 2018 Samsung QLED TV lineup gets an update promising smoother gaming-- FreeSync, the AMD software able to sync refresh and frame rates in order to reduce screen tearing and stuttering.

FreeSync is similar to an Nvidia Solution, G-Sync. It was previously available only in monitors, and other than gaming PCs equipped with AMD GPUs it can be handled by the latest Xbox consoles, the S and X, thanks to a recent update.

The TV market is set to return to growth in 2018, Futuresource Consulting reports-- the recovery of several markets and the transition to 4K UHD models will bring global sales of $85 billion, a 5% increase over 2017.

"We believe 4K UHD TV sets will ship over 100 million units this year, equivalent to two-thirds of the entire large screen market," the analyst says. "Consumers increasingly want larger screens, and this is playing nicely into the 4K UHD proposition."

The two biggest markets, China and the US, saw falls in 2017 but the outlook for 2018 is positive. Futuresource says the two markets are ahead in terms of 4K UHD and large screen adoptions, with over 75% of sets sold in both US and China in 2018 being over 40-inch. That said other regions are catching up, with W. Europe matching the 44% Chinese household ownership of 4K UHD TVs by 2022.

Customers demanding a TV with the most pixels now get a Sharp option-- the Aquos LC-70X500E is a 70-inch UHD TV offering 7680 x 4320 resolution. Or, in other words, an 8K TV.

First launched at IFA 2017 and already available in Japan and China, the LC-70X500E pushes no less than 33 million pixels, for a density of 125 ppi. It also offers wide colour technology covering 79% of the Rec.2020 colour gamut, and supports HDR through HLG and HDR10. The display uses full array LED backlighting technology with 216 LED zones of dynamic local dimming, and a 2.1 audio subsystem is included.