While I was home for Thanksgiving I looked at some of ANH on the TV at my parents’ house, which is set up very well but only does HDR10 and not DolbyVision, And it was really dull-looking and dark and just all around underwhelming. It’s strange how drastic the difference was with the DolbyVision set in my apartment; there are plenty of other movies I’ve watched on both TVs and I’ve never experienced a drop-off in quality this extreme.
Dolby Vision is vastly superior because it includes HDR trim metadata for each individual shot of a movie, manually tone-mapped by the colorists to accommodate a wide variety of television conditions. Basically, there are several versions of the film, each optimized for a specific style of TV. So the creator’s intent is preserved as closely as possible, no matter the brightness range (or limitations) of your supported HDR TV.
Whereas, HDR10 includes just a single HDR master of the film. There’s no trim metadata, and therefore no preservation of the creator’s intent across various viewing environments. With HDR10, it’s up to the television manufacturer to tone-map the HDR master to fit their TVs’ color reproduction capabilities. So as a result, HDR10 looks wildly different on every single TV. It’s a total disaster. But if you have a really high end TV, then HDR10 should in theory look pretty good. (However, if you have a high end TV, you’re probably just using Dolby Vision instead anyway).