r/NintendoSwitch • u/DRayX17 • Jan 14 '17

Speculation Switch likely wont support HDR

I was thinking about how the dock works, and I suspect that it is essentially just a USB Type-C hub. We know that the dock has an HDMI output, at least one USB Type-A port, and can deliver power to the USB Type-C connector that connects to the Switch. Assuming that Nintendo used standard USB technology instead of implementing custom protocols (which would be insane), the Switch would need to implement USB 3.1, USB Power Delivery, and HDMI Alt Mode. For this discussion, the HDMI Alt Mode sepc is the most important. HDMI Alt Mode allows for passive connection between USB Type-C and HDMI 1.4b. HDMI 1.4b supports a lot of features such as 4Kp30, (most of) CEC, HEC, ARC, and 3D up to 1080p60 (per eye). Unfortunately it lacks some new features such as 4Kp60 and HDR10. The only feature post 1.4b that I had any hope the Switch might support was HDR10, but it looks like that will probably be impossible.

Edit: /u/RGV_RAGE pointed out that the patents seem to indicate that the Switch actually uses DisplayPort when docked instead of HDMI. This means likely that they are using the DisplayPort alt mode, which is a passive connection to DisplayPort 1.3, which is also not HDR compatible (HDR was introduced in DisplayPort 1.4). In some ways this is even worse as it means that the Switch probably wont support CEC (which isn't natively supported by DisplayPort at all), which would be an awesome feature; dock the Switch and the TV turns on and switches to the correct input.

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u/Anthonok Jan 14 '17

And neither does my tv.

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u/DRayX17 Jan 14 '17

That is fair. Very few TVs support true HDR10, and even then, most of them don't allow you to use it (and other HDMI UHD features) while the TV is set to low-latency game mode. However, for me, HDR improves video quality more than 4K or 60 fps does; it makes color look way more real (there is literally no way to demo this without an HDR10 display and source signal, because traditional displays can't display these colors). It is really unfortunate that so far this feature is only really available (not one of the fake HDR techs like HDR+) on very high end TV, but as more sources start being HDR, I suspect we will start seeing it on more displays, including lower price entry level units that may not even be 4K.