Samsung’s announced updates to its latest HDR format, HDR10+ Advanced, which it hopes will bring brighter, richer, more detailed images to your home TVs.
HDR10+ Advanced was announced back in 2025, shortly after Dolby Vision 2, and it aims to do the same things as Dolby’s new HDR format but in a slightly different method.
It builds on the foundations of HDR10+, using scene-by-scene metadata to improve brightness and contrast, with the Advanced version making use of “more detailed picture information, AI-powered tone mapping and greater control over motion.”
As TVs have gotten brighter (partly due to Samsung’s own efforts), the content you watch remains mastered at lower brightness levels. Samsung has looked at this and pondered how content can take advantage of higher brightness TVs but still preserve “the look and feel intended by filmmakers and content creators”.
By expanding the amount of dynamic metadata signal present in a film or TV series, HDR10+ Advanced has more control to shape the brightness, colour performance and motion processing; while, it claims, still preserving the intended appearance. Samsung claims this gives compatible TVs “more detailed guidance across midtones as well as the brightest and darkest parts of the image”, with AI tone-mapping roped in to help produce a brighter HDR performance.
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The use of AI may be controversial to some, but Samsung believes it will have a positive effect on the end result. With HDR10+ Advanced, Samsung TVs make use of AI models that have been trained on “thousands of expert-graded HDR samples”, these models run on the TV in real-time, “generating optimal tone-mapping curves” based on what’s present in the metadata signal, to improved the brightness and help make highlights stand out even more, without losing the detail present in darker scenes.
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To combat errant motion processing that results in the “soap opera effect”, HDR10+ Advanced offers Intelligent Motion Smoothing, that allows creators and streaming services to set the level of smoothing for individual scenes in a manner not too dissimilar to Dolby’s Authentic Motion. Levels range from 0 (off, essentially Filmmaker Mode) to 5 (maximum smoothing).
Rather than applying the same strength of motion processing throughout the run time of a film or TV episode, Intelligent Motion Smoothing can tailor its performance for different scenes so you won’t have to experience any distracting motion smearing.
HDR10+ Advanced is also coming to games as it’s now been extended to cloud gaming, helping “compatible” games to deliver an optimised image without the player needed to calibrate the HDR performance on their side.
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At this moment in time HDR10+ Advanced is only been made available on compatible Samsung TVs, so only those with those TVs will be able to experience this latest iteration of HDR10+ Advanced.
As HDR gets smarter, it’ll be interesting to see what new features are added to level up the experience, and we’ll be looking with keen eyes as the how HDR10+ Advanced continues to grow.