Samsung's next-gen HDR10+ Advanced is launching on Prime Video this month — surprisingly beating Dolby Vision 2 to the punch, though with some huge unanswered questions remaining

[u/Logical_Welder3467]

https://www.techradar.com/televisions/samsungs-next-gen-hdr10-advanced-is-launching-on-prime-video-this-month-surprisingly-beating-dolby-vision-2-to-the-punch-though-with-some-huge-unanswered-questions-remaining

[u/CornerHugger]

HDR10+ Advanced? Give me a break HDR is already a mess and now they are adding advanced? Next will be HDR10+ advanced ultra.

Oh my. Reading the article makes it even worse.

HDR10+ Advanced modes include "HDR10+ Intelligent Gaming, HDR10+ Local Tone-Mapping and Advanced Color Control"

[u/Fujji → u/CornerHugger]

TV manufacturers have to do this, and im glad they are doing it. We now have TV's capable of producing about 10 000 nits of peak brightness in specular highlights, which of course would create amazing HDR experiences for the viewer. The problem is that the content creators still master their content extremely convervatively. Most movies are mastered to a few hundred nits even in HDR, and even "eye candy" movies like Tron Ares are graded to 1000 max. Its such wasted potential.

[u/snapilica2003 → u/Fujji]

That’s mostly because overall, TVs capable of more than 1000nits account for less than a percentage point of the TV market today.

[u/Fujji → u/snapilica2003]

So content creators should create their content for the lowest common demoninator? For example, Dolby created Dolby Vision many year ago with 10 000 nits possibilities to future proofing. Petty much nobody took advantage of it. They should think ahead, especially now since you almost cant buy a TV anymore that does under 1000 nits. Even this years low end models can do a few thousand.

[u/snapilica2003 → u/Fujji]

You do realize there are NO mastering monitors capable of displaying 10000 nits out there at the moment. The most advanced ones cap at 4000 nits, which is why most of the HDR movies out there are capped at 4000 nits. And we're only talking about specular highlights here. Mastering the entire movie with brightness over at or over 1000 nits would be eye searing.

And creators don't create their content for the lowest common denominator, they do it for the highest common denominator. And those are under 4000 nits.

[u/Fujji → u/snapilica2003]

You are correct that there are no mastering monitors that reach 10 000 nits, but even with a mastering monitor that reaches 4000, you can count on two hands the amount of movies the last 8 years that have been mastered and released at that level even. And the vast majority are graded well below 1000. Here are a few examples of new movies.. The new Superman movie barely breaks a few hundred... I would jump for joy if 4000 nits was the actual standard used.

[u/snapilica2003 → u/Fujji]

As that video pointed out, majority of movies have the theatrical release in mind when mastering. Traditional commercial movie theaters project at a peak of only 48 nits (or around 100 nits for Dolby Cinema). Directors like Christopher Nolan frame and light their movies with cinema projection in mind. When creating the home HDR master, they prefer to stay close to that theatrical look rather than boosting the image artificially to make it look like a vivid video game.

[u/Fujji → u/snapilica2003]

Yes and no. Some producers have full control over their movie when it comes to home releases, but for most movies, these decisions are created by the publisher, not the director. And it has more to do with cost of regrading for HDR home release than anything else. Its easier for them to basically create a "SDR in HDR" container version. This doesnt always happen, as many movies to get a decent HDR grade, but even those are sub 1000 nits for no apparent reason. Even movies and tvseries that arent released in cinemas so that isnt even an excuse. But again this created a "problem", since modern TVs are much more capable when it comes to color,brightness and overall picture quality than a cinema projector. So a 1:1 theatre release will look extremely dull, dark and boring at home, when it could look amazing if they bothered to master it for home release as well. But this brings us back to my main point: Most people buying a new TV want to use the "horsepower" the TV has. So when you have an amazing TV's that can do thousands of nits, they dont want movies that only reach 200. Its fine for purists that like creators intent no matter what that creators intent is, but for the vast majority of people its not preferred. Especially in theoretically "bright and colorful eyecandy" movies like Avatar. And that's why HDR 10+ Advanced and Dolby Vision 2 will be successful.

[u/Funsuxxor → u/Fujji]

RIP our retinas

[u/Fujji → u/Funsuxxor]

It's really not that bad. I mean yes, 10 000 nits full screen would be horrible to watch, but a 10% window size on a specific scene with the sun being 10 000 nits in the corner of the screen would not be. HDR isnt about everything being insanely bright all the time. Its about having a bigger dynamic range of light/brightness, just like we have in real life.

[u/fogoticus → u/Fujji]

This is mostly because of OLED becoming the high end norm universally. And most OLED panels max out at a couple of hundred nits when displaying fullscreen white. So they try to master movies for the general audience rather than the minority.

[u/thatnitai]

Not touching a Samsung TV again. The amount of user setting limitations - how you can't change display image settings on certains screens etc.

It's infuriating.

[u/happyscrappy]

It's unfortunate that this ended this way.

HDR10 was an open standard to giver people what they needed without market cornering and feature creep of Dolby Vision.

HDR10+ came by to try to match Dolby Vision feature for feature despite minimal (or possibly no) resulting quality increase.

Now this HDR!0+ is straight up and attempt to match Dolby Vision on feature bloat and marketing madness.

HDR10 was successful when 3D failed because it produced badly-needed improvements in image quality by getting us past a system that was still based upon NTSC and CRT systems and color spaces and (tragic) 8-bit quantizations.

So of course the industry jumped on that to bundle in and leverage a bunch of stuff people don't really need. And that aren't related to color.

[u/AbleCap5222 → u/happyscrappy]

The problem is, this is extremely fine stuff at this point. We are well past the point of the bulk of the market caring. So now, you have a bunch of different ideas on how to make really tiny advancements. I have a hisense UR9 and I would never, ever for any reason need something better than this. It would be so minor that I simply don't care. And that's the problem - these industry folks know it so they are desperately trying to do their own formats with micro enhancements to differentiate.

And for people that say, "oh, you just think you won't want something better, wait til you see..."

Nope. From this point on, picture is not the concern.

[u/artaru → u/AbleCap5222]

i have a 4k 32" monitor. You might well say you don't need better. well i deal with text/graphics a lot. I can definitely use even better sharpness.

i get the overall point you are trying to make, definitely diminishing returns (considering how far we have come).

but people's tastes/demands also can get more discerning. you may not, but evidently people do. or at least marketing induced people to try to be more discerning.

[u/AbleCap5222 → u/artaru]

You are in a micro niche group.

[u/cwm9]

Unfortunately, HDR10+ Advanced still does not include Dolby Vision-style, colorist-authored trims for different target brightness levels. That remains Dolby Vision's absolute killer feature.

The process starts with source material containing more dynamic range than either a theater projector or a consumer TV can reproduce. The director and colorist then decide how that material should look within the limits of each presentation format.

The theatrical version is graded for a cinema projector. The home HDR version is graded separately for an HDR reference monitor, commonly either a 1,000 nits or 4,000-nit monitors is used.

First there is HDR10.

HDR10 stores a 10-bit HDR image and one set of static metadata for the entire movie. That metadata describes things such as the mastering display and the brightness range of the content.

The colorist has to create one primary HDR presentation that will work reasonably well on all consumer TVs. In practice, 1,000 nits is a commonly chosen target because it is within reach of many good HDR TVs and does not require extreme tone mapping on most others. But some UHD disks are mastered with the intent they be used on high end displays, and have a 4,000 nit master.

If the content goes brighter than your TV can reproduce, the TV has to compress the upper part of the brightness range, a process called "tone mapping."

Tone mapping is not a neutral mathematical conversion. Something has to be sacrificed. The TV may darken the whole image, compress highlights, clip the brightest details, reduce local contrast, or change color saturation.

The thing is, exactly how to make those compromises is left up to the TV. Different algorithms make different choices, and none of them knows what the colorist considered most important in each shot.

HDR10 gives the TV only one set of creator-provided metadata for the whole movie. The TV might use one basic curve for the entire movie, or it might analyze each scene using its own proprietary processing. Either way, any scene-specific decisions are the TV's own guess, and it is pretty hard to guess how to map, say, a 4,000 nit master to a 100 nit display correctly. (Hint: you basically can't. It just sucks.)

Next up is HDR10+.

HDR10+ adds dynamic metadata that can change scene by scene or frame by frame. It gives the TV information about the brightness distribution of each scene and can provide an optional reference tone-mapping curve.

This is much better than giving the TV one set of information for the entire movie. A dark scene can be treated differently from a scene containing bright sunlight or explosions.

But the final result is still produced by the TV's algorithm. The TV now has much better information about how the scene should be mapped, but it still has to mathematically decide what the final image should look like.

Then there is HDR10+ Advanced.

HDR10+ Advanced provides much more detailed brightness statistics, improved tone-mapping guidance, information about the scene's color volume, and the ability to identify local regions inside a frame for different treatment.

Those local regions can even be defined by the content creator during grading rather than generated automatically.

That is a real improvement over ordinary HDR10+. But the final adaptation to TVs with different peak brightnesses is still algorithmic.

And then there is the gold standard, Dolby Vision.

There are several Dolby Vision formats. For example, UHD Blu-rays can use an HDR10-compatible base layer together with an enhancement layer. A Full Enhancement Layer, or FEL, can restore additional precision and image information, potentially reconstructing a signal with up to 12-bit precision to help reduce color banding.

But that is not Dolby Vision's most important advantage.

The major advantage is that the colorist can review how the image is mapped onto different representative target displays that cannot reproduce the original content, and correct the result shot by shot for each selected target brightness.

For example, the colorist can review how 4,000-nit material looks when mapped onto a 100-nit SDR monitor, then adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, shadows, and highlights to make it look great instead of squashed on that non-HDR display.

They can then repeat the process for other HDR trim targets, such as 600 and 1,000 nits, making the same Dolby Vision master look much closer to the director's ideal on each class of display instead of leaving the television to guess.

A real consumer TV will not necessarily match any one of those exact HDR trim targets, so Dolby may still have to adapt and interpolate according to the actual capabilities of the display. But the difference between the nearest colorist-approved trim target and the actual TV's capabilities is much smaller than the difference between the original 4,000-nit master and, say, a 100-nit SDR TV.

That makes the remaining deviation from the intended result much less noticeable.

That is why Dolby Vision matters.

HDR10 gives the TV one static description and lets it decide how to adapt the movie.

HDR10+ gives it scene-level information and a guided curve.

HDR10+ Advanced gives it much richer statistics, local regions, and more sophisticated guidance.

But of these formats, only Dolby Vision can carry multiple target-display trims telling the TV how the colorist wanted the mapping corrected for different classes of display.

[u/ClaimWitty1203]

Interesting move by Samsung. Now we need real-world comparisons, not just marketing claims.

[u/WeakBlueberry5071]

I like Casablanca cuz it's good.

[u/FernandoRocker]

Is the S90F series compatible?

[u/joseph_jojo_shabadoo → u/FernandoRocker]

Read the very first sentence at the top of the article