Dolby Vision — the premium standard in picture quality.
Dolby Vision has come to redefine picture capablity that takes realism in AV entertainment to new levels of refinement. The biggest and most innovative makers of TVs have adopted this format.
Dolby Vision provides spellbinding, close to natural visuals
A creative director starts out with a vision to reproduce visuals for the audience ‘just as they appear in nature.’ While such keenness is not misplaced, highly realistic and natural visuals can be achieved only with the right technological tools. An adequate version of video technology emerged on mainstream TV in 2016 in the form of HDR, which attempts to bridge the gap between the visual satisfaction provided by nature and the final rendering of content on displays. It also coincided with a more wholesome acceptance of 4K displays in the mainstream. Soon, HDR 10 and HDR 10 + arrived as a natural culmination and raised the bar further with higher and keener levels of colour depth, contrast, and brightness adding greater variety and gradients to visuals.
Dolby’s version of HDR
With the HDR family of video display technology being adopted by various display manufacturers, there was a natural response from Dolby, and sure enough, it soon arrived in the form of Dolby Vision, a 12-bit colour depth technology that upended the existing hierarchy and charts.
For the most part, Dolby Vision provides a much wider colour gamut than it’s counterparts that arrived first. It also boasts a futuristic standard that makes it capable of mastering video content at 10,000 nits peak brightness.
Dolby Vision, however, does not just line up with the HDR standard. Rather, it goes a step higher offering more to keen audiences. It transports metadata from a natural setting, through the production studio, projecting it on your display in your living room or on your palm held device. Generic HDR too carries metadata through the production process, but, the metadata carried by Dolby Vision is dramatically different. The nuance lies in the fact that Dolby Vision’s metadata is adaptive to each frame of visuals. The brightness information contained in it enables each frame to optimise brightness and colour depth, making every frame and scene even more realistic, offering a more naturalised and satisfying cinematic experience.
HDR vs. Dolby Vision
So, the primary difference between the HDR profile and Dolby Vision is that HDR carries statlc data, which in itself makes for a high standard in picture technology, but Dolby Vision is much more accommodative and carries dynamic metadata which is much more adaptive and advanced.
Dolby Vision is futuristic
Further, Dolby Vision is a futuristic picture technology format as it masters a 12-bit colour depth, lending a manifold higher colour splash – a whopping 68 billion colours – to your display. HDR 10 , on the other hand, as the name suggests, is capable of mastering up to 10–bit colour depth. In contrast, the 10-bit colour depth offered by HDR 10 produces one billion colours.
Significantly, too, Dolby Vision is capable of mastering up to 10,000 nits peak brightness which is far more than present display technology can support, making displays future proof and more adaptive to content.
So, Dolby Vision, by making available, dynamic metadata to the display, creates more realistic visuals with it’s pointedly specific and adaptive rendering of visuals that reveal more brightness and colour depth, making for a more satisfying cinematic experience.
What is Dolby Vision IQ?
It is a logical step up over Dolby Vision. It intelligently adapts picture parameters to the ambience of your living room. Dolby Vision IQ relies on in-built sensors that detect light conditions in the room and accordingly, automatically adjusts the display settings of your TV to render an elevated picture reproduction. Resorting to these settings you can compensate for the excessive lighting conditions in the room. What it achieves, is an optimal rendering of colours, brightness, and deep blacks in the picture and keeps excessive glare out of view. Also, it considers the metadata of the content being watched, on the fly, providing the viewer with a perfect picture balance without having to resort to fiddling with the brightness, contrast, and colour saturation levels.
Dolby Vision IQ is a climactic point in high dynamic range evolution, which works to achieve the goal of reproducing the perfection of natural visuals in the AV entertainment spaces of everyday living.
Which brands support Dolby Vision? | Dolby Vision content
To experience the refined picture quality of Dolby Vision, you basically need a TV that supports this proprietary format. A number of leading brands and makers offer TVs that incorporate Dolby Vision and it’s refinements. These include innovative giants like LG, Sony, Philips, Panasonic as well as Hisense and TCL.
Once you begin experiencing Dolby Vision, you will discover the elements of Dolby Vision Cinema and Dolby Vision Home. The two are adaptive conveniences. The former automatically adjusts visuals on the fly as dictated by the metadata, while Home does the same, but with added brightness to adapt to ambient lighting.
As for Dolby Vision appropriate content, you don’t need to look far as, household names like Amazon Prime Video, Disney +, Apple +TV and Netflix cater fairly well to subscribers of Dolby Vision content. But, Dolby Vision goes beyond TV, and happily, it has made significant inroads into the gaming arena. X Box series S and X support Dolby Vision, but with the understandable caveat that they need to be hooked to a similarly compliant TV.
Dolby Vision in your palm
So, is the ubiquitous mobile platform Dolby Vision-enabled too? Absolutely. It has naturally spilled over into the massive and still expanding landscape of mobile entertainment. LG was the first to adopt this technology with the release of it’s G6. Xiaomi and Apple phones are among others, that support the Dolby Vision format.
For those who are part of the Apple ecosystem, there is the benefit of iTunes movies which are available in the Dolby Vision format.
