Samsung HDR10+ Adaptive Feature Will Take Into Account Ambient Light

Pixel count, although an important spec, isn't the only factor that will determine a picture's or video's quality. Other elements come into play but color and brightness are two of the most important ones. After inundating the market and consumers with 2K, 4K, and now 8K marketing, TV makers have started focusing on HDR and brightness/contrast as key marketing points. For its upcoming QLED TVs, Samsung will be leaning heavily on the former with a new HDR10+ Adaptive feature that tries to make its TVs seem smarter.

HDR, short for High Dynamic Range, practically determines the range of colors and brightness that screens are capable of displaying, at least in this context. There have been at least two competing standards in that area but HDR10 and, subsequently, HDR10+ are perhaps the better-known of the two. Of course, there are still variations on how hardware manufacturers support this feature and Samsung is adding yet another layer on top of it.

As the manufacturer explains, HDR is often best enjoyed in dark environments, like cinemas or home theater rooms where there is very little ambient light to clash with the colors produced by the TV. Other brighter environments often require manually adjusting other settings, like brightness, contrast, and color, often for each and every video show. It's definitely a chore and one that HDR10+ Adaptive aims to fix.

Using a Samsung QLED TV's light sensor, HDR10+ Adaptive is advertised to automatically adjust all those settings to offer the best picture, no matter the lighting condition. It won't just adjust it on a per-video basis but even scene-by-scene so that dark scenes won't look too bright just because the previous scene's brightness and contrast were pushed high to compensate for bright daylight.

But just because Samsung's upcoming QLED TVs have HDR10+ Adaptive means all videos will be able to take advantage of the feature. In fact, only Amazon Prime Videos have been specifically mentioned to be automatically delivered in HDR10+. Additionally, those TVs will also support Filmmaker Mode, also only for Prime Videos, which turns off the controversial motion smoothing that TV makers themselves wanted to push to everyone.