Samsung lets you turn off annoyingly bright HDR content in all apps with One UI 7

Ben Schoon | Dec 26 2024 - 8:43 am PT

HDR content looks amazing, until it burns your retinas at 11pm in a dark room. Annoyingly, the ability to turn off HDR content on Android devices has been missing, but Samsung is finally providing an option with its One UI 7 update for Galaxy devices.

One UI 7 brings a number of tweaks and changes to the system, and one of those is a new option to turn off “Super HDR” via the Settings app. Samsung describes this toggle saying:

Automatically adjust the display to show the full range of colors and contrast in pictures taken with Galaxy devices.

It’s a relatively vague description, and certainly doesn’t fully explain what’s going on. What this toggle does is, on a system level, disables the full brightness of HDR content when apps are display content in HDR. Previously, a similar toggle in the Samsung Gallery app disabled this output in that specific app, but it’s system-wide in this new version, working even in third-party apps such as Instagram in our testing, though we did notice that the app needed to be fully closed after the toggle is changed for HDR to fully turn off.

The folks over at Android Authority explain that Samsung’s “Super HDR” is using Google’s “Ultra HDR” format which is also used by third-party apps and other brands. So this isn’t limited to photos taken by Samsung Galaxy devices, but any content using the “Ultra HDR” format. The setting is found under Settings > Advanced features > Super HDR.

For now, this toggle is only available in One UI 7, Samsung’s Android 15 update, which is only on the Galaxy S24 series in beta. The update will be rolling out to more devices in 2025 and, hopefully, it will bring this toggle along with it.