You may have seen the news about the update to the HDR10+ Advanced format. It’s less of an update but more of a further clarification of what exactly HDR10+ Advanced does.
Since it was announced back 2025, we’ve had general rumblings about HDR10+ Advanced but nothing particularly specific. It’s as if the launch of Dolby Vision 2 sprung Samsung into action, but what they presented was an idea rather than something fully realised.
What this announcement offers is more depth and understanding about HDR10+ Advanced, so to me, this acts as the first proper ‘reveal’ of HDR10+ Advanced.
I was recently in South Korea to hear more details from Samsung about the format. Now that I’m more informed, what thoughts do I have about HDR10+ Advanced? It’s a little complicated.
Preserving the cinematic look
We live in an era of TV where it’s possible for TVs to hit not just 1000 nits of brightness, but close to 4000 nits. That higher number is not within reach for the general TV buyer unless they’ve got £3000 / $3000+ to spend on a new TV, but this year I’ve reviewed TVs around £1000 that can reach 1000 nits. That level of brightness is no longer super-expensive to get.
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But Samsung believes there’s something amiss. It feels that this level of brightness is not being properly harnessed, in particular by content that’s mastered at low levels of brightness. So with HDR10+ Advanced, it was to give TV series and films a boost in brightness in-line with what TVs are capable of.
But the obvious problem with that is intent.
A film or TV series was envisaged to look in a certain way, and with – as I understand it – HDR10+ Advanced doing processing after the fact, the look of what was intended in the first place will change.
Samsung believes it can remain faithful to what the creator intended, but I’m not sure that’s possible. The main difference between HDR10+ and HDR10+ Advanced is the addition of more metadata in the signal that provides a more “accurate representation of tonality” – in essence, with more metadata at its disposal, it better reflects what was intended by the creators.
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But again, I’m not sure I agree with that perspective, and the demos I saw of HDR10+ Advanced in Suwon, left me less sure about the direction of the HDR format. There was a comparison between it and a Dolby Vision stream of The Rings of Power, and in all honesty, I preferred the Dolby Vision stream.
It wasn’t as bright, and the colours didn’t look as punchy as they did in the HDR10+ Advanced stream. But to my eyes, the colours looked more natural, black levels didn’t look lifted, skintones didn’t have a red push to them. Side-by-side, the Dolby Vision stream looked more cinematic than the HDR10+ Advanced stream.
After mulling it some more, the problem that I have is that content should look how it was meant to be. If that’s meant to be at low brightness then so be it, because altering how it looks makes films and TV series look more artificial.
What HDR10+ Advanced should do is preserve the look, not artificially inflate it with a boost. Samsung’s ethos has been high brightness TVs, and it wants more content available that fits that ethos, but from what I’ve seen of HDR10+ Advanced so far, it’s less faithfully translating the film or TV series but more a re-interpretation of it.
I’m sure Samsung would disagree with that thought, but I can’t think of a different conclusion.
Filmmakers now want a cinematic look for TV series and films, but cinema also means low brightness. It’s mastered in dark environments, cinema auditoriums are by their nature, dark. That’s the antithesis of what TV brands in this day and age want from home viewing. How do you bridge this gap?
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I’m not sure it can be bridged nor should it be. Cinema is what it is, and trying to change it never really works. It’s why 3D didn’t take off. It’s why 48fps and 120fps came and went. It’s partly why I think 8K isn’t really a thing anymore. Higher brightness content isn’t really ‘cinema’ as we know it.
HDR10+’s biggest problem is that it’s not Dolby Vision. The benefit of Dolby Vision is that content is mastered in the format at the stage that filmmakers are bringing their vision together – Dolby Vision reflects how the filmmaker wants their vision to look.
And the problem with HDR10+ Advanced is that I don’t think it’s the filmmaker’s vision that’s being put front and centre – it’s Samsung’s.