HDR10 is the most widely supported HDR format and is built into almost every television, streaming service and 4K disc that supports HDR at all. It uses static metadata, meaning the brightness and colour information describing how the content should look is set once for an entire film or programme, rather than changing between scenes.
Because HDR10 is an open standard with no licensing fee, it has become the baseline that virtually all HDR capable devices support, which makes it a reliable fallback when a more advanced format is not available on a particular title or device. Its static approach is simpler for hardware to handle, though it gives the television less scene by scene guidance than dynamic formats.
Formats such as Dolby Vision and HDR10+ add dynamic, scene by scene metadata on top of a similar underlying idea, aiming for more precise results where a television supports them. Our HDR explained guide compares all the common formats side by side.