- Samsung reveals HDR10+ Adaptive next-gen HDR, coming in 2026
- It shares many similarities with Dolby Vision 2’s new features
- Amazon Prime Video will support it, but only simulations have been shown so far
Samsung has revealed HDR10+ Advanced, its next-gen HDR format that will compete with Dolby Vision 2 to offer even better images on the best TVs in the future.
It includes some upgrades that directly match what Dolby Vision 2 is offering, but also some unique features of its own – like Dolby’s new tools, they’re aimed at improving image quality for newer tech that’s become more common since the current HDR formats were conceived.
There are six key upgrade areas in HDR10+ Advanced, as reported by regular TechRadar contributor John Archer, over at Forbes:
- HDR10+ Bright
- HDR10+ Genre
- HDR10+ Intelligent FRC
- HDR10+ Intelligent Gaming
- HDR10+ Local Tone-mapping
- Advanced Color Control
HDR10+ Bright
HDR10+ Bright is the equivalent to Dolby Vision 2’s ‘bi-direction tone mapping’, and it’s tech to make HDR look more accurate and rich on today’s super-bright TVs – and in particular on the RGB mini-LED TVs of the future, according to our friends on What Hi-Fi?, who saw a simulated demo of how this feature is expected to look.
Here’s the issue HDR10+ Bright is intended to solve: most movies today are mastered for a maximum brightness of 1,000 nits in their home release. When TVs have a brightness below 1,000 nits (as the best OLED TVs did until a few years, and as many cheap TVs do today), the different brightness levels of HDR images are ‘tone mapped’ down by Dolby Vision and HDR10+, so that the image still looks accurate, just with a more limited range of brightness and darkness than the original mastered version does.
But what if a TV’s brightness is above 1,000 nits, as so many of the best mini-LED TVs today are, including Samsung’s? Well, that’s been more of a Wild West. That also requires tone mapping, but in the other direction, so the dynamic range gets expanding rather than compressed. Whether this remains accurate or not has depended on the TV’s processing – but HDR10+ Bright aims to add some consistent accuracy for brighter TVs.
Samsung is planning to launch its new ‘Micro RGB’ TVs in 2026 – which we’ve had a preview of – which should deliver really high brightness and richer colors, so this tech seems tailor-made for it.
HDR10+ Genre
This promises to apply specific picture enhancements based on the type of thing you’re watching – I assume this means dark crime dramas will have emphasis on retaining detail in shadow, while sport will worry less about the contrast and more about clear, vibrant color tones.
HDR10+ Intelligent FRC
This is the equivalent of the Authentic Motion feature in Dolby Vision 2 that I saw in action earlier this year. The idea here is that instead of motion smoothing simply being active or inactive at different levels of strength, creators can tell the TV (using data embedded within the video) how strong the motion smoothing should be – and it can be changed on a shot-by-shot basis.
So a quiet drama movie should require very little motion smoothing, keeping everything looking natural in general. However, if there’s suddenly a panning shot across a landscape, which is the kind of thing that’s likely to cause a lot of visible judder in a movie – then the motion smoothing can increase for a short period, so the movie always looks like it was intended to at in movie theaters (where the lower brightness and projection tech mean judder isn’t usually visible).
Interestingly, it seems that this can adjusted depending on the lighting conditions too – judder is less visible on dimmer displays, so if you’re watching in a dark room with brightness not so cranked up, the system might not use as strong a smoothing setting.
HDR10+ Intelligent Gaming
This is a new system of adapting the tone mapping in real-time based on ambient lighting to maintain detail in an image, but specifically in a way that works well for cloud gaming services – as long as the cloud gaming service supports HDR10+ Advanced. It could mean better visibility in very dark areas of the screen, for example, which is always useful for gaming.
Which cloud gaming services will support it? That remains to be seen, but Nvidia has supported the current HDR10+ gaming standard, so there’s a good chance GeForce Now will be on board.
HDR10+ Local Tone Mapping
Apparently, this means that the image can be analyzed by TVs in a much more precise way to determine how best to apply local dimming of a backlight in a mini-LED TV, potentially meaning better contrast and less blooming from light to dark areas, depending on the TV’s physical capabilities.
Advanced Color Control
This one’s a little vague, but certainly intriguing. According to Forbes, it means creators can send “more precise color data to TVs so they can produce a more accurate color performance”. I don’t know exactly what that will mean, but if it’s the color equivalent of tone mapping – meaning that TVs can tweak how they’re handling the colors based on their own capabilities, ensuring that what you’re seeing is what the creator intended – then that could be very interesting.
When is HDR10+ Advanced coming, and who will support it?
So far, we know that Samsung is planning to bring the tech to its future TVs, and that Amazon Prime Video will support it on its streaming platform.
Apparently, Samsung is focusing on bringing HDR10+ Advanced to its 2026 TVs, which will probably be announced at CES 2026, and will launch in the spring. I don’t have information from any other TV makers yet, or whether current Samsung TVs might be updated to support it, but I’ll aim to find out more.
However, it’s a little surprising that Samsung has only shown people simulated footage of what it’s expected to look like so far – when I saw Dolby Vision 2, I was told the tech was actually running on real TVs with real footage, and that was a few months ago.
That makes me a little concerned about whether HDR10+ Advanced will meet this expected deadline… but on the other hand, what good will it do Dolby Vision 2 to be first if there’s no content? Right now, it only has Canal+ on board publicly, so if HDR10+ Advanced has big Prime Video shows ready from the start, it has an advantage.
I suspect this means that CES 2026 – the Consumer Electronics Show, held annually in Las Vegas in January – will be a real battle of the HDR formats, as well as being a big battle of RGB-backlit TVs.
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