WHAT IS DOLBY VISION?

Dolby Laboratories is an American technology company that is rooted in giving every individual the best AV experience when it comes to entertainment. They have been the pioneers of new formats in audio for cinema and other media forms over the past few decade. They are are now the authority for Surround Sound and placement of audio in a 3 dimensional space on a mass scale.

Dolby Vision is their newest foray into the visual aspect of cinema and this has already made waves in the space. To fully understand Dolby Vision, we need to first understand what HDR and SDR is.

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and SDR stands for Standard Dynamic Range; both precursors to Dolby Vision. The dynamic range of an image or film refers to the contrast or the large colour and brightness range. While SDR is the predecessor of HDR, HDR is the predecessor of Dolby Vision. Broken down to a quantifiable difference between them, SDR produces an 8 bit image that can deliver 16 million colours, HDR produces a 10 bit image that can deliver 1 billion colours, Dolby Vision produces a 12 bit image that can deliver 68 billion colours. HDR is commonly referred to as HDR10.

The most impressive advantage of Dolby Vision versus HDR is the addition of metadata to the core HDR image data. This metadata is then read by the processor in a Dolby Vision enabled television or projector as a set of instructions that are set on a scene-by-scene basis. This metadata then helps the television/projector deliver more impactful colour and better image quality which is reflected on screen to be a far more accurate representation of the visual media being portrayed.

Dolby Vision has now been widely accepted and incorporated into multiple devices that range from televisions and projectors to smart phones and gaming consoles. Dolby Vision as a format has even crept into our daily consumable media. Netflix has been one of the fastest incorporators of Dolby Vision and is now producing most of its content in this format. Even though these are still early days for Dolby Vision as an image format, we can only expect it to grow into a visual standard that will be accepted the world over.