HDR10 is the most common HDR format you will see on 4K TVs, streaming services, and UHD Blu-rays. The “10” refers to 10-bit color, which allows many more shades than standard 8-bit video and helps reduce color banding in things like skies, shadows, and gradients. HDR10 uses the PQ HDR transfer curve (the same basic HDR brightness mapping used by several formats) and includes metadata that tells a display how the content was mastered, like the intended peak brightness and color primaries.
The key thing to know is that HDR10 uses static metadata, meaning those HDR instructions generally apply to the entire movie or episode rather than changing scene by scene. In practice, your TV still does the heavy lifting with tone mapping, which is how it adapts the master to your screen’s real brightness capabilities. For example, if a movie is mastered with very bright highlights, a midrange TV may compress the brightest parts to avoid clipping while trying to preserve detail. Formats like Dolby Vision and HDR10+ can add dynamic metadata that adjusts more frequently, but HDR10 remains the baseline HDR layer you can count on seeing almost everywhere.
