So the format war has a first shot fired. Samsung put the announcement out yesterday: HDR10+ Advanced goes live on Prime Video globally sometime this month, and Samsung's 2026 sets are the first hardware to take it. Dolby Vision 2 was announced back in September 2025, a couple of months earlier than HDR10+ Advanced, and it still has no launch date. Peacock has promised to be first with it, on Hisense sets initially and TCL later.
What nobody has told us is which 2026 Samsung models, or which titles. TechRadar asked and got nothing back. So right now this is a press release you can't act on, which is a strange way to win a race.
The two features Samsung is leading with are Enhanced Overall Brightness and Intelligent Motion Smoothing. The first is the one I care about. Most films are still graded on 1,000-nit mastering displays while the panel in my living room goes well past that, so every TV is guessing above the grade and every brand guesses differently. Extra statistical metadata to steer that guess is a real problem being addressed, not a slide in a deck. The motion one I'm less sure about. It's shot-by-shot control over how much smoothing gets applied, which is Dolby's Authentic Motion under another name, and handing a director a dial that switches on interpolation feels like something that gets abused inside a year.
The November 2025 announcement listed six pieces: Bright, Genre, Intelligent FRC, Intelligent Gaming, Local Tone-Mapping and Advanced Color Control. Two of those are shipping. If you're on a 2026 Samsung, has anything in the Prime Video app changed for you yet - a badge, a new picture mode, anything? I want to know which panel and which title, because Samsung isn't saying.
What nobody has told us is which 2026 Samsung models, or which titles. TechRadar asked and got nothing back. So right now this is a press release you can't act on, which is a strange way to win a race.
The two features Samsung is leading with are Enhanced Overall Brightness and Intelligent Motion Smoothing. The first is the one I care about. Most films are still graded on 1,000-nit mastering displays while the panel in my living room goes well past that, so every TV is guessing above the grade and every brand guesses differently. Extra statistical metadata to steer that guess is a real problem being addressed, not a slide in a deck. The motion one I'm less sure about. It's shot-by-shot control over how much smoothing gets applied, which is Dolby's Authentic Motion under another name, and handing a director a dial that switches on interpolation feels like something that gets abused inside a year.
The November 2025 announcement listed six pieces: Bright, Genre, Intelligent FRC, Intelligent Gaming, Local Tone-Mapping and Advanced Color Control. Two of those are shipping. If you're on a 2026 Samsung, has anything in the Prime Video app changed for you yet - a badge, a new picture mode, anything? I want to know which panel and which title, because Samsung isn't saying.
