What exactly is HDR10?

Question

There are a lot of TVs that have an "HDR10" sticker on the box, but whenever I read reviews, everyone says it's not true "HDR" and that the TV can just accept HDR content, but not actually display it correctly.

Then what's the point of having HDR10?

Don't manufacturers have to build TVs with certain features or functions to output HDR content?

Answer 1

FYI, HDR is High-Dynamic Range. CRT's even supported it, as long as the picture was "pure black" (not the grey you're used to seeing when powered off), OR if you cranked the contrast up all the way (or 75%). HDR10 is just an addition. Refer to the wikipedia article.

Answer 2

most tv's are now just pc's. however they are all restricted by the PIXELS that make up the screen. it would be pretty naff if a tv made today could not at least still work tomorrow when a new standard containing more data(more detail thus more pixels) came out. Thus any TV should provide downsizing of newer technologies to allow it to display a picture, and upsizing of old technologies to fill its screen properly. Plus not all of us can afford the screen that has all those extra pixels on it and the higher bandwidth services to communicate that mass of extra data. so if its HD Ready then at least you will get a representation of the HD picture with the pixels available. Or to put it another way, a Pixel has a physical size and shape you just cant cram extra ones in to an existing lcd.

Answer 3

From cnet: HDR10 is as close to a standard as we've got. It's free to use for manufactures, so it's available everywhere. Every HDR TV can decode it, every HDR streamer can stream it. Pretty much all HDR content has an HDR10 version, in some cases along with a more "advanced" HDR format like Dolby Vision, which we'll discuss in a moment.

HDR10's issue, if you can call it that, is that it has "static" metadata. This means that there's one HDR "look" for the entire movie or show. This is certainly better than SDR content, but it doesn't allow for, say, a really bright scene to look its absolute best, nor a dark scene its best, within the same movie. This one-size-fits-all aspect of static metadata is fine, but doesn't let the content nor the TV live up to its full potential. You need dynamic metadata for that, which most of the other formats have.

HDR10 isn't backward-compatible with SDR TVs, so it's no good for broadcast. You'll find it available with streaming content and on Ultra HD Blu-ray.