Samsung Electronics has provided a deeper look into the mechanisms behind its latest high dynamic range format, HDR10+ Advanced, which debuted on some of its 2026 television models earlier this year. In a blog post, the company talked about how the new technology makes use of dynamic metadata and artificial intelligence to set a new standard for living room picture quality.
If you’re not familiar with HDR10+ Advanced, it’s the company’s new premium HDR format that was introduced last December in a seemingly-rushed fashion as a response to the arrival of Dolby Laboratories’ Dolby Vision 2 technology that was revealed two months earlier.
But Samsung’s blog post shows that the new tech was anything but rushed, and instead the culmination of years of research into how AI algorithms can help to optimize colour accuracy, brightness, contrast and the other dynamic factors that go into creating a perfect picture on-screen.
There was quite a long wait between that announcement and HDR10+ Advanced’s arrival on Samsung’s most advanced TVs, such as the S99H and S95H OLED models that debuted in the summer, but it finally arrived on user’s screens three months ago in partnership with Amazon Prime Video, the first streaming provider to add support for the new format.
Those who’ve seen HDR10+ Advanced with their own eyes may well have been wondering just what Samsung did to achieve such realism, and if so, Samsung’s deep-dive into the tech should go a long way towards satisfying their curiosity. The blog post describes the nuts and bolts of the new format, as well as its ongoing work to make home entertainment experiences even brighter, smoother and smarter in future.
Samsung said a fundamental shift in the AV landscape was the reason for its decision to upgrade HDR10+. The company’s original high-end HDR format first arrived way back now in 2017, and back then the primary challenge for TV makers was that Hollywood content was generally mastered at much higher brightness than what even the best consumer TVs were capable of. But nowadays, advances in display technology have flipped that on its head, and modern TVs can now hit a level of brightness that surpasses what most content is mastered at.
One of Samsung’s goals with HDR10+ Advanced was therefore to try and bridge that gap and take advantage of the higher brightness of newer TVs without compromising the creator’s original intent. To that end, it introduced the concept of “extended distribution metadata that provides more granular guidance to modern displays, so as to avoid stretching dimmer master content to match newer TVs eye-searing peak luminance – as that often crushes the finer details and skews the contrast. With extended distribution metadata, Samsung’s TVs can more accurately map tonality across extreme highlights, shadows and midtones to better reflect reality.
The company pairs this expanded metadata with AI algorithms designed specifically for tone mapping. These on-device models were trained on thousands of expertly-graded HDR samples in order to analyse the scene-by-scene data provided by HDR10+ Advanced mastered content in real-time. This allows them to continuously generate bespoke tone-mapping curves as the content is being played or streamed, Samsung explained. The result is an image that takes full advantage of the TV display’s brightness to ensure spectacular highlights that pop-out with natural, yet vivid colours, without washing out any of the details in darker or shadowy scenes and parts of the picture.
Samsung also talked about how it rethought scene-by-scene motion control. One of the longstanding criticisms of HDR is how it accentuates the judder that occurs when 24-frames-per-second content is displayed on modern panels with rapid refresh rates, especially during scenes that feature slow camera pans. TV manufacturers have tried to resolve this using motion interpolation techniques, but this is often overapplied, resulting in what’s known as the “soap opera effect,” where such scenes look unnaturally fluid.
The company said HDR10+ Advanced has finally sorted out this problem once and for all with its new Intelligent Motion Smoothing feature that allows content creators and streaming platforms to encode motion handling instructions directly into the HDR metadata. The creator can specify a smoothing level ranging from 0, which means totally disabled, all the way up to 5 for maximum fluidity, and apply this on a scene-by-scene basis. As a result, a live football game broadcast can crank this up to maximum fluidity to ensure better clarity as the ball zips around the field, while the director of a moody cinematic drama might lock motion into its natural 24fps cadence to minimise the soap opera effects.
Another key innovation in HDR10+ Advanced is genre-based metadata, which helps the TV to understand the content that’s being played. This utilises a two-tier structure that spans 16 content classes and 64 specific sub-genres, allowing the TV to understand intricacies such as camera movement, lighting conditions and the exact nature of the sport being played, Samsung said. For instance in a live Premier League football game, HDR10+ Advanced can introduce processing tweaks to take into account the rapid motion of the ball and the green hues of the pitch.
Last but not least, Samsung talked about what HDR10+ Advanced means for gamers. For them, the company introduced Adaptive Cloud Gaming features that extend the premium HDR format to cloud-based video game titles. This allows video game studios to take advantage of dynamic tone mapping and real-time ambient light data to optimise picture quality, contrast, brightness and overall immersion dynamically as the game is being played, so gamers don’t have to fiddle around trying to calibrate HDR themselves.
Samsung’s rundown is well worth a read, revealing the lengths its experts have gone too in order to try and replicate on-screen exactly what the human eye sees in reality, and it’s certainly a fabulous technical achievement. But doing this in its R&D research labs is one thing, the question now is whether content creators and streaming platform providers will be willing to implement all of these advanced algorithmic controls to take advantage of it. So far, only Amazon has done so with a select few Prime Video originals and movies. If Samsung can convince more streamers, like Netflix and Disney+, and some of Hollywood’s biggest studios to do the same, this could be the beginning of a new chapter in the battle for HDR supremacy.
