Dolby Laboratories has confirmed that the Dolby Vision 2 standard, which has already begun rolling out on Hisense TVs since last week, will also be compatible with existing 4K Blu-ray players too. However, that’s not to say that anyone will actually benefit from this, because the onus is on the 4K Blu-ray manufacturers to enable Dolby Vision 2 through a firmware upgrade, and it’s not clear if anyone will.
This interesting little tidbit of information came forth via an interview TechRadar held with some of Dolby’s senior executives. Upon discovering that Dolby Vision 2 could be enabled on 4K Blu-ray players, the website contacted some of the top brands that still actually manufacture these devices, but so far no one has confirmed they’ll bother with it.
Sony responded that it has no plans to provide a firmware upgrade for its existing 4K Blu-ray players. “We do not plan to provide a software/firmware update to support Dolby Vision 2 on the current Blu-ray player lineup,” was all the company would say on the matter.
Sadly, Sony seems to have become a sworn enemy of disc-based media, having recently declared that the upcoming PlayStation 6 console will not come with a 4K Blu-ray drive, meaning that players will only be able to download games, rather than purchase a physical copy.
TechRadar also asked Panasonic and Magnetar for their thoughts on the matter, but so far neither company has responded to its request.
Nonetheless, the news is interesting, because Dolby Vision 2 only runs on a few new televisions due to the need for a modern processor that has, so far, only appeared in a handful of new models. However, it can be supported by 4K Blu-ray players because all they have to do is pass the encoded information from the media source (a compatible 4K Blu-ray disc) to the TV it’s connected to, making it much easier. But Dolby says they still need a firmware update before this can happen.
Of course, the Dolby Vision 2 data must also be encoded onto the actual 4K Blu-ray disc, so that means it would only be possible with newly released titles. Any older titles in your collection will remain limited to the older Dolby Vision standard.
Even so, Dolby insisted that so long as you have a Dolby Vision 2-compatible TV, you will see some benefits from the technology, even if using an old disc on a non-firmware-upgraded 4K Blu-ray player. That’s because the Dolby Vision 2 standard introduces a new image processing engine that helps to enhance visual content. It’s able to enhance picture quality using existing Dolby Vision metadata, and so it promises there will be a noticeable difference even with older discs.
For now, the only TVs that currently support Dolby Vision 2 are a few select models from Hisense, such as the Hisense UX, Hisense UR9 and Hisense UR8 TVs that launched recently. All of these have the new MediaTek Pentonic 800 chip that’s required to deliver the enhanced metadata. But we can expect more TVs to add support for Dolby Vision 2 soon, including some of the newer ones from Philips and TCL.
Samsung’s TVs won’t be getting Dolby Vision 2, however its newer models will support the rival HDR10+ Advanced technology instead. That’s set to happen later this month, with Amazon Prime Video being the first streaming service to offer compatible content.
