HDR10+ Advanced Pushes Brightness, and Dolby Vision Looks More Like the Director's Intent

Samsung has finally given a clearer picture of HDR10+ Advanced, and the more I learn about it, the more it looks like a question about who decides how a film should look at home.

HDR10+ Advanced has been floating around since it was announced in 2025, but until now it's been mostly talk. The timing isn't a coincidence. Dolby Vision 2 arrived and Samsung responded with an idea rather than a finished format. What's changed is that I've now seen the technology up close, during a trip to Samsung's facilities in Suwon, South Korea, where the company walked me through how it works and what it's meant to do.

What the format is trying to fix

TVs have come a long way. Plenty of sets can now reach 1000 nits, and premium models get close to 4000. The catch is that most of that headroom goes unused when the content itself was mastered at lower brightness levels. Samsung's argument is that a lot of films and series leave TVs underpowered, and HDR10+ Advanced is designed to use the extra capability.

The price of entry for that capability has dropped too. Getting 4000 nits still means spending £3000 or $3000 and up, but sets around £1000 that hit 1000 nits are now common in my review queue. So the hardware argument is easy to follow. Samsung has the panels, and it wants the content to match them.

The mechanism is what needs close reading. HDR10+ Advanced adds processing after the fact, lifting brightness beyond what the master was built around. The main technical difference from standard HDR10+ is extra metadata in the signal, which Samsung says gives a more accurate representation of tonality. In theory, richer metadata should help the TV understand what the creators intended. In practice, I'm not convinced more data answers the intent question. It just gives the TV more information to act on.

Side by side with Dolby Vision

The demo that stuck with me used a Dolby Vision stream and an HDR10+ Advanced stream of The Rings of Power. The Dolby Vision version was less bright, and its colours didn't leap off the screen the way the HDR10+ Advanced version did. Yet I preferred it, and not by a small margin.

Here's the thing: the Dolby Vision picture looked more natural. Black levels stayed deep rather than lifting into grey. Skin tones didn't carry the reddish push I noticed in the Samsung version. Put the two next to each other and the Dolby Vision stream looked more like a film, and the HDR10+ Advanced stream looked more like a film that had been retouched.

That's a demo, not a lab test, and it was one title on one set-up, so I'd hold my conclusions loosely. Still, it's the kind of difference that tends to show up when processing moves away from the original grade. Brightness and saturation are easy to push. Keeping shadows and skin tones faithful while you push them is much harder.

The cinema problem

My bigger issue is with the goal itself. Filmmakers increasingly want their work to look cinematic at home, but cinema means dark. Projection rooms are dim by design, and films are graded with that environment in mind. The modern TV industry, meanwhile, wants bright, punchy pictures that stand out in a showroom and on a living room wall.

That gap has defeated plenty of ideas before. 3D never became the norm, 48fps and 120fps faded, and I'd argue 8K hasn't become the everyday standard many expected either. Trying to bend cinema toward what TV makers want has a track record of not sticking. Higher brightness might be a legitimate way to enjoy content, but it isn't really what most people mean by cinema anymore.

And yet, the format's ambition makes sense from Samsung's side. High brightness is the selling point of its TVs, and more bright content helps the case for them. Samsung says it wants to remain faithful to the creator's intent, but when a format is built to add brightness beyond the master, faithfulness becomes a matter of interpretation.

Whose vision ends up on screen?

This is where Dolby Vision has an advantage. Its appeal rests on the idea that content is mastered in the format during production, so the filmmaker's choices are baked in from the start. The TV then reproduces what the colourist and director signed off on. HDR10+ Advanced works the other way round, adjusting the picture after the fact.

So my problem with HDR10+ Advanced isn't that it's bright. It's that, from what I've seen so far, the director's vision seems secondary to Samsung's idea of how a picture should look. I'm open to being wrong once I see it on retail sets with a wider range of titles. For now, if I'm choosing what a film should look like, I'd rather it was the film's version and not a re-interpretation.

What I'll be watching next is whether Samsung can show HDR10+ Advanced preserving shadows, skin tones and grading choices across different content, and whether it gives viewers a simple way to turn the processing down. Brightness is the easy part to sell. Proving it stays faithful is the work still ahead.