High Dynamic Range, or HDR, is a transformative technology, turning drab-looking movies into head-turning, eyebrow-raising treats of color and contrast. It makes the whites whiter, the blacks blacker, and helps the color just pop off the screen. It’s why certain modern movies look so gorgeous, and why they can also look drab and overly-dark if your TV is poorly configured.
There are a range of different HDR formats, and depending on the TV you’re watching on, the streaming platform you’re using, and the content itself, you may end up using any one of them. But the main three we’re going to discuss today are the three most popular options: HDR10, Dolby Vision, and HDR10+. Each of these handles HDR a little differently and though there are some strengths to each of them, they all have their weaknesses too.
Here’s how HDR10, HDR10+, and Dolby Vision compare in 2025.
What is HDR?
HDR represents the unlocking of more colors, higher levels of contrast, and significant brightness. With a broader color gamut over Standard Dynamic Range (SDR), HDR opens up more hues that TVs could not produce for so many years. As a result, HDR allows for more realistic content to be presented on today’s 4K TVs. SDR can only present a fraction of the color depth that HDR can. For example, SDR displays can only showcase 256 shades of red, green, and blue, while HDR can showcase 1,024 shades.
For HDR content to be displayed, an HDR-capable TV and a source of HDR content, be it a media player like a Blu-ray player or a streaming service like Netflix or Hulu, is needed.
Image quality
HDR’s big advantage is better image quality. Whether you’re watching the latest Marvel film or playing a game on your Xbox console, better image quality will improve your overall experience. But how exactly does HDR deliver that improved picture quality when compared with SDR? The answer lies in three elements: Bit depth, brightness, and metadata. Let’s take a quick look at each one and how the different HDR formats use them.
Bit depth
Bit depth describes the number of colors a movie or TV show includes as well as the number of colors a TV can display. Each pixel of your TV is made up of three discrete colors: Red, green, and blue (RGB). Each of these colors can be broken down into hues. The greater the bit depth, the greater the number of hues you get, and thus the greater the number of colors.
SDR content, for instance, uses a bit depth of 8 bits. Eight bits allows for up to 256 hues of R, G, and B. If you multiply 256 x 256 x 256, you get 16.7 million possible colors. That sounds like a lot, but when you look at HDR10 and HDR 10+ formats — which make use of 10 bits and can display up to 1.07 billion colors — it’s easy to see that HDR is much more colorful. Dolby Vision takes that up a notch with 12 bits, for a maximum of 68.7 billion colors.
While TVs that can handle 10-bit color are quite common, there are no TVs that support 12-bit color yet. So Dolby Vision’s massive color advantage is going to be moot for the time being.
Brightness
TV brightness is measured in candelas per square meter (cd/m²) or nits (1 nit is roughly equal to 1 cd/m²). When it comes to peak brightness, Dolby Vision takes the crown. It can support display brightness of up to 10,000 cd/m², whereas both HDR10 and HDR10+ max out at 4,000 cd/m². Although these were considered out of the reach of most TVs a few years ago, that’s no longer the case.
The Sony Bravia 9 gets quite close to 4,000 nits in HDR mode, and the Hisense U8N can go even further.
Metadata
Metadata, in the context of HDR, is an extra layer of information that tells a TV how it should display the content it’s receiving. This information covers things like peak brightness, contrast, and something known as tone mapping, all of which contribute to making HDR video look so much better than SDR. However, not all HDR formats use the same kind of metadata. HDR10 uses static metadata, which means the information governing brightness, contrast, etc., is delivered to the TV at the beginning of a movie or TV show and doesn’t change until you switch to a new movie or TV show.
Dolby Vision and HDR10+, on the other hand, use dynamic metadata. This allows each scene — or even each frame of video — to be properly adjusted for the best results.
Availability
HDR10 is considered the default HDR format. This means that if a movie is presented in HDR, a streaming media device claims to support HDR, or a TV is marketed as an HDR TV, they will all support HDR10 at a minimum. This near-universal support puts HDR10 heads and shoulders above Dolby Vision and HDR10+ when it comes to availability both in content and devices, although HDR10+’s recent inclusion among the formats that Netflix supports has now made it even more broadly accepted, especially for Samsung TV owners (read on for more).
But Dolby Vision, once considered a hard-to-find premium option, is more widely available today than ever. You’ll find Dolby Vision support on plenty of HDR TVs with the exception of Samsung TVs. Samsung continues to be the one TV maker that refuses to pay Dolby’s licensing fees for Dolby Vision. Dolby Vision content is also becoming more commonplace. You’ll find it on UHD Blu-ray discs as well as streaming services such as Disney+, Apple TV+, Netflix, and Amazon Prime Video, just to name some of the most popular options.
Dolby Vision also comes in different, more advanced modes, such as Dolby Vision gaming, which keeps the input lag as low as possible whilst still pushing up the brightness and contrast. Dolby Vision IQ utilizes ambient light detection to adjust the HDR image to better suit the environment it’s in.
HDR10+ is the royalty free version of HDR that handles dynamic metadata like Dolby Vision, but without being proprietarily locked down. In the U.S., you’ll find it on all Samsung HDR TVs, as well as Sony, TCL, Panasonic, and Hisense. LG doesn’t offer it, but it does have Dolby Vision instead.
Conclusion
With better brightness, color, and the benefits of dynamic metadata, Dolby Vision is clearly the best HDR format. It’s supported on TVs from LG, Vizio, TCL, Hisense, and Sony, and you can find it on an increasing number of the top streaming services.
However, HDR10, as the de facto HDR format, remains the most accessible of the three both from a content and device point of view. HDR10+ may offer many of the same benefits as Dolby Vision, and it’s more widely available than ever, but it doesn’t have the reach of HDR10 or Dolby Vision.
But here’s the good news: HDR formats aren’t mutually exclusive. If you buy a TV that doesn’t support Dolby Vision, you can still watch HDR10 (or HDR10+ if applicable). And because streaming providers can offer multiple versions of HDR per movie, your TV should automatically receive the highest quality format that it supports. For instance, if you stream a Marvel movie from Disney+ that is available in Dolby Vision, your TV will still get the HDR10 version if that’s the best format it can display.
