From your home theatre to the cineplex, Dolby has long been the industry standard for serious digital sound. If you’re not using Dolby’s proprietary tech, you’re playing games. With Dolby Vision tech, the company wants to do to make movies on your TV look as good as it makes them sound on your surround sound system.
Dolby has been teasing this new TV technology for a while, and now at CES it’s made Dolby Vision an official product, with launch partners TCL and Sharp who will be showing products using the tech on the show floor.
Technical details are still pretty scarce on Dolby Vision, but from the release, it appears that it’s a solution that can be use by everyone from content creators to product manufacturers to ensure that the colour of the video you’re watching on your fancy television is right. Rather than speculate wildly on what the heck that all means, lets turn to Dolby’s words:
Even though most TV shows and movies are recorded using camera technology that captures the colours and brightness of real life, much of that richness is lost by the time consumers get to watch. That’s because current TV and cinema colour-grading standards are based on the limitations of old technologies and require that the original video content be altered — dramatically reducing the range of colours, brightness, and contrast — before it can be reproduced for transmission and playback. Dolby Vision changes that, giving creative teams the freedom to use the full gamut of colours, peak brightness, and local contrast, with the confidence that those will be reproduced faithfully on televisions that feature Dolby Vision.
In other words, if you use Dolby Vision technology when you’re making and mastering your product, and the manufacturers support the technology on their TVs, you can be sure that the reproduction is going to look just the way it’s supposed to.
We’ll have to wait until we learn more about Dolby Vision before we can say too much more, but Dolby’s standardisation has pretty much always had a positive effect for consumers, so it’s probably a good thing Dolby’s tackling the problem of digital video. Because what’s the point of splurging on a fancy UHD TV if you’re not getting the colour right?