For some time now we have been hearing the term Dolby Vision as an innovative technology that we should all know about, but the reality is that few know what exactly it consists of. Precisely for this reason, in this article we are going to tell you what this technology consists of , which is obviously the property of Dolby Laboratories.
As always, hardware manufacturers tend to get ahead of software manufacturers. This means that although there are already many products compatible with Dolby Vision, if this technology has not been implemented in the software it will not do any good, since as you know the end user experience is always the combination of hardware + software, and without one of both the thing does not work.
What is Dolby Vision?
Dolby Vision is the name Dolby Laboratories has given to the company’s unique interpretation of high dynamic range (HDR) technology, and the promise is that it provides a visual enhancement comparable to what we saw going from Full HD to full resolution. 4K. This technology has already been tested in the professional environment (essentially in the cinema) and little by little it is reaching our homes through some television channels or paid streaming services.
This technology is, therefore, a particular form of Dolby HDR, without more, that has to do in this case with parameters such as brightness, colorimetry and the reproduction of dynamic micro contrasts.
Push the limit of HDR to the capacity of the human eye
If years ago we lived in the era of Full HD, now we are in the era of 4K and HDR. The manufacturers promise us that with HDR everything will look better and that the experience we have when viewing images improves significantly, with richer colors and greater contrasts between them. In the case of Dolby, as experts in the field of consumer and professional multi-channel signal processing, they have now expanded into the field of video with this technology that promises us just that, to improve the viewing experience.
According to Dolby, there are three ways to improve the user’s viewing experience:
- Increase the number of pixels (4K, 8K, etc.) that have been getting through our eyes for a long time. Let’s remember that many years ago when we all had 720p monitors, we were told that it looked blurry and that we needed Full HD to see the sharp images. Now it turns out that Full HD looks blurry and 4K is what we need. You already know how this works.
- Increase the number of images per second (FPS) . Normally in the cinema the FPS are limited to 24 (rounding), but they are already beginning to change this for some years and for example the first movie of the Hobbit trilogy was already recorded at 48 FPS, while the promised Avatar 2 that It will arrive soon has been recorded at 60 FPS.
- Increase the performance of the pixels . If it is possible that even having the same number of pixels, these are capable of representing a greater dynamic range and with a larger color space, the reproduction quality is improved.
It is precisely on this last point that Dolby Vision technology is based; the brand’s engineers looked to the audience for the answer, and after numerous tests came to the conclusion that a system capable of reproducing a range of light intensities that encompassed between 0 and 10,000 nits would satisfy 90% of the audience. And this is exactly what Dolby Vision allows, offering very bright images with a much higher contrast ratio and with richer and more defined colors.
Is there a difference between HDR 10 and Dolby Vision?
Right off the bat you should know that HDR 10 is an open standard, while obviously Dolby Vision is a proprietary system owned by Dolby. For its part, HDR 10 is so called precisely because it uses a 10-bit quantization scale, and each of the TV manufacturers that uses it can implement it as they want (in fact some call it HDR 1000 and they stay so wide), so it is important to know that it is the standard adopted by the UHD Alliance both to grant the Ultra HD Premium rating and for the calibration of 4K movies on Blu-Ray.
For its part, as we have said, Dolby Vision is particular to Dolby, as if it were a private standard but obviously manufacturers can pay royalties to carry their seal if they meet the hardware specifications. This standard proposes a quantization of 12 bits instead of 10 and, above all, a chain of procedures with rigorous control from calibration in the post-production stage of audiovisual content to viewing, the only way to guarantee that the image viewed by the viewer meets the manufacturer’s requirements.