When Dolby Vision 2 was announced, AV journalists joked that a HDR10+ sequel would be on the way much like Hollywood’s obsession with launching two similar films at once (some of us joked it’d be called HDR12+).
Well, it’s no laughing matter as Samsung has announced that HDR10+ Advanced is on its way, and that this latest incarnation of the high dynamic range video standard will be giving Dolby Vision 2 a run for its money.
Trusted Reviews travelled to South Korea to have a brief look at the sequel. Here’s what you need to know about the next-generation HDR format.
It’s going to be Bright
Under the umbrella of HDR10+ Advanced will be a number of different versions that will come together to when needed. A bit like a Power Ranges megazord.
First is HDR10+ Bright. Given TVs are getting brighter and brighter each year, regularly surpassing 3000 nits in some cases. Samsung’s solution comes in HDR10+ Bright which features new, extended statistical metadata (using AI) to better understand brighter displays.
It’ll be able to “dynamically enhance brightness and colour”, assisting TVs that can hit up to 4000 – 5000 nits and wider colour gamut coverage (BT.2020, 100%).
In short, it’ll be able to tap into the headroom of extra brightness to deliver HDR content with the required brightness and colour performance.
Factor in other features such as local tone-mapping (for greater accuracy and depth to colours); along with colour control (for better reproduce colours on screen); and HDR10+ Advanced looks to provide the best experience no matter what screen you happen to be using.
It knows what you’re watching (sort of)
With HDR10+ Genre, Samsung says that content creators can specify a genre and the encoder can tailor/optimise the performance to that genre/classification.
What those genres are Samsung didn’t provide specific information on, but we’d be willing to guess they’d be a Standard, Movie, News and Sports version at the very least.
A smooth (motion) operator
Motion Smoothing doesn’t have the best reputation but HDR10+ Advanced wants to give it a boost. It’ll apply motion smoothing when it’s required, implying it’s not an always on/off solution which is further emphasised by the fact that the feature is called HDR10+ Intelligent FRC.
It’ll be ablt to identify the content type, such as sports, drama, news etc; as well as how bright the image is and the TV environment (what the latter means, we’re not too sure). The gist is, it’ll be able to adapt to watch you’re watching without you having to adjust the settings.
It’ll give cloud gaming a boost
There’s a gaming aspect to HDR10+ Advanced but the focus is on cloud gaming rather than game console or PCs.
HDR10+ Gaming will be able to adapt the tone mapping (basically adjusting how colours look and brightness levels for less capable displays), and it’ll do it in real-time depending on the ambient room lighting to provide the most optimal experience regardless of the display you’re using.
When will HDR10+ Advanced launch?
There are other questions milling around HDR10+ Advanced that we do not know the answer too, and to be fair to Samsung, HDR10+ Advanced is still in development. No doubt we’ll be hearing more at CES 2026.
We do expect it to launch in time for Samsung’s 2026 TV range and given that the 115-inch Micro RGB TV has gone on sale in both Korea and the United States, we imagine HDR10+ Advanced is being developed to take advantage of the increased performance that these types of TVs will offer.
We don’t all the models that will support, and we suspect that it won’t altogether replace the standard HDR10+ version. Unless we weren’t listening to the presentation. We’ll admit that we were a little sleepy.
Samsung did treat us to a ‘simulation’ of what the effect they hope HDR10+ Advanced will have; with brighter, more colourful images; improved black levels and dark detail and motion smoothing that sticks to its task better (HDR10+ on the left and a “simulation” of HDR10+ Advanced on the right).
Whether we’ll see it adopted by streaming platforms and physical media remains to be seen, and we’ve not heard any whispers about other manufacturers adopting the technology yet.
No doubt they’ll be more details around the time of CES if not around February 2026 when World of Samsung swings back around for another year.
