The difference between HDR10 and Dolby Vision
The difference between HDR10 and Dolby Vision
Bringing home a new TV is always exciting and never more so now that modern TVs have transformed home entertainment to deliver a cinema-like experience. And while 4K resolution gets a lot of well-deserved credit for that, high dynamic range (HDR) is arguably more important for getting a picture that pops.
There are a lot of things to consider in getting a TV that meets your needs, and one of the most important is HDR.
What is HDR and why should you care?
To put it simply, HDR is a way to make your TV’s picture more vibrant and lifelike, with better brightness, contrast, and color.
Older consumer displays could reproduce content only in standard dynamic range (SDR), which is limited to 8-bit color, meaning it could only produce about 16 million colors. SDR brightness is limited to about 100 nits of peak brightness. A nit, if you’re wondering, is a unit used to measure brightness. A higher number means a brighter display. SDR TVs typically had a maximum contrast ratio of about 1,200:1, meaning the brightest image it could display would be about 1,200 times brighter than the darkest image.
Next, we can take a look at color resolution, which defines the range of colors and contrast that a TV, computer, or other device is capable of displaying to reproduce an image. A lot of older content — including broadcast TV, streaming, DVDs, and Blu-rays — is in SDR. On a good TV, they can still be enjoyable, but to get a picture that stands out, you need an HDR display.
Modern TVs marked as 4K Ultra HD have HDR. HDR increases the potential brightness with HDR displays starting from about 300 nits. Some TVs currently for sale exceed 1,000 nits of brightness, with others even brighter. Dolby Vision allows content creators to use even brighter highlights, whereas some other HDR formats limit content creators to use only up to 1000 nits.
Additionally, HDR’s contrast ratio is essentially infinite. What this means is that the bright parts of a scene can be far brighter than with SDR, and the dark parts can be darker. You can see more details in the shadows even while the sunlit parts of a scene are bright. HDR also supports more colors.
All TVs sold as HDR will offer HDR10, the basic version of HDR. This has 10-bit color and can reproduce about 1 billion unique colors. While that may seem like a lot, it’s far less than what we see every day in the real world. Dolby Vision is an enhanced form of HDR that can use up to 12-bit color, currently available on select content in Dolby Vision, resulting in about 68 billion colors that create a dramatically richer, true-to-life image. Not all 4K HDR TVs can display Dolby Vision, but all TVs enabled with Dolby Vision can also display HDR10 content, so you get the best possible visual experience for a broad range of content. Look for the Dolby Vision badge when shopping for a TV.
The difference of Dolby Vision
As movie and TV buffs ourselves, we understand that being immersed in a story — whether it’s a movie, a shows, or a documentary — involves more than staring at a screen. The Dolby Difference is about seeing, feeling, and connecting to the characters.
Beyond a wider array of colors, Dolby Vision does something else that sets it apart from HDR10: dynamic metadata. You can think of the HDR metadata as an embedded instruction manual for hardware screens — TV, mobile, or computer — telling them how to display the image. HDR10 uses static metadata, meaning the settings are based on the best average values for the content. Dynamic metadata uses different settings optimized for each scene and takes full advantage of the different capabilities of each HDR display. This gives you the most true-to-life version of your movies or shows. Without any action required on your part, changes in light and dark between shots — whether subtle or substantial — are automatically adjusted to keep viewing easy on your eyes. It’s a night-and-day difference. You might also see HDR10+ mentioned. This is an HDR format that uses 10-bit color and dynamic metadata. It’s less common than Dolby Vision, with less content using it.
Dolby Vision is available for many movies and shows on a variety of streaming services (some require premium subscriptions), including Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis on Max and Scream VI on Paramount+. Just look for the Dolby Vision badge. Disney+ offers movies from Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. Netflix brings you movies from the Oscar®-winning Roma to the sly environmental satire Don’t Look Up. Apple TV+ offers Killers of the Flower Moon, from director Martin Scorsese, and the kaiju origin story Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
It’s not just recent movies and shows, either. You can rediscover favorites in Dolby too! There are hundreds of classic movies and shows available in Dolby Vision, both on streaming and on disc, including Stranger Things, Citizen Kane, Star Trek: Discovery, Jaws, and The Godfather. No matter what you’re into or what mood you’re in, there’s a movie or shows in Dolby Vision that will let you catch every detail, whether you’re watching for the first time or revisiting content you love.
If your TV is enabled with Dolby Vision and you subscribe to the appropriate streaming service, you’ll automatically be able to catch every detail when you select a movie or show in Dolby Vision. Get the most from your viewing experience with a picture that comes alive.
Dolby Vision doesn’t just give you unmissable detail when watching movies or shows, though. Dolby Vision takes gaming to the next level for many leading game titles for Microsoft Xbox. Enjoy vibrant environments without having to adjust settings, as Dolby Vision does it for you. You won’t lose track of opponents in the shadows with the surprisingly revealing Dolby Vision experience. Just connect your Xbox Series X/Series S to a TV with Dolby Vision and enable Dolby Vision in your settings. Then you’re ready to go. After you have set up your Xbox, there are lots of great games you can play in Dolby Vision. So, grab a controller for a truly immersive gaming experience.
Dolby Vision is ready when you are
You have the choice to enjoy content in Dolby Vision wherever and whenever you want. Whether you’re watching on a full home-theater setup, a TV, a computer, a gaming console, or a tablet or mobile, you can find devices enabled with Dolby Vision so you get dynamic contrast for deeper detail and phenomenal frame-by-frame quality.