Samsung has announced updates to its latest HDR format, HDR10+ Advanced, which the company hopes will bring brighter, richer and more detailed images to your home TV.
Announced back in 2025, shortly after Dolby Vision 2, HDR10+ Advanced aims to achieve the same functions as Dolby’s new HDR format, but with a slightly different method.
It builds on the foundations of HDR10+ and uses scene-by-scene metadata to improve brightness and contrast, with the Advanced version leveraging “more detailed image information, AI-powered tone mapping and greater control over motion.”
As TVs have become increasingly brighter (thanks in part to Samsung’s own efforts), the content you watch remains manageable even at lower brightness levels. Samsung took a look at this and thought about how content can take advantage of higher brightness TVs while still maintaining “the look and feel intended by filmmakers and content creators.”
By expanding the amount of dynamic metadata signals present in a film or television series, HDR10+ Advanced has more control over shaping brightness, color performance and motion processing; It is said that the intended appearance should be retained. Samsung claims this gives compatible TVs “more detailed guidance about midtones as well as the brightest and darkest parts of the image,” incorporating AI tone mapping to deliver brighter HDR performance.
The use of AI may be controversial to some, but Samsung believes it will have a positive impact on the bottom line. With HDR10+ Advanced, Samsung TVs use AI models trained on “thousands of expert-rated HDR samples.” These models run on the TV in real time and “generate optimal tone mapping curves” based on what’s present in the metadata signal to improve brightness and bring out highlights even more without losing the detail present in darker scenes.
To combat faulty motion processing that leads to the “soap opera effect,” HDR10+ features Advanced Intelligent Motion Smoothing, allowing developers and streaming services to adjust the level of smoothing for individual scenes in a way not too dissimilar to Dolby’s Authentic Motion. Levels range from 0 (off, essentially Filmmaker mode) to 5 (maximum smoothing).
Instead of applying the same level of motion processing throughout the entire runtime of a movie or TV episode, Intelligent Motion Smoothing can adapt its performance to different scenes so you don’t have to experience annoying motion smearing.
HDR10+ Advanced is also coming to gaming, as it has now been expanded to cloud gaming, helping “compatible” games deliver an optimized image without the player having to calibrate HDR performance themselves.
Currently, HDR10+ Advanced is only available on compatible Samsung TVs, so only those who have these TVs can experience this latest version of HDR10+ Advanced.
As HDR gets smarter, it will be interesting to see what new features are added to improve the experience, and we’ll keep a keen eye on how HDR10+ Advanced continues to grow.
