Dolby Vision Explained

Dolby Vision is a variant of HDR that looks set to gain traction with manufacturers. But what is it, how does it work and how can you take advantage of the format?

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Dolby has played a key role in the development of HDR for cinema and home theatre applications. But for the viewer, perhaps its most important contribution so far has been its advanced form of HDR, Dolby Vision.

Dolby Vision has the potential to improve consumers’ viewing experience by optimising the way their TVs deliver HDR pictures. It also gives producers more control over how their HDR programming appears.

Until CES 2017, it was assumed that Dolby Vision hardware (screens and Ultra HD Blu-ray players) needed a dedicated chip. However, it is possible to add Dolby Vision support via a firmware update to devices with powerful enough processors.

The standard HDR10 format is free for manufacturers, but Dolby Vision requires a licence fee. So what’s so special about Dolby Vision that hardware brands and consumers would pay extra? Quite a bit.

What is Dolby Vision?

The most significant advantage of Dolby Vision HDR over HDR10 is the addition of dynamic metadata to the core HDR image data. This carries frame-by-frame instructions that a Dolby Vision-capable display can use to portray the content as accurately as possible. Dolby Vision capable TVs combine the information from the source with an awareness of their own capabilities in terms of colour, brightness and contrast performance.

With HDR10 content, your HDR TV receives only static metadata – basic ‘global’ information on the content that applies to the entire film or TV show. It can’t provide a display with updates on how each specific frame should be shown. Nor does HDR10 carry the same facility for optimising the picture to the capabilities of the screen it’s showing on.