After being announced last September, Dolby Vision 2 is rolling out to TVs, starting with the 2026 Hisense UX, UR9, UR8, and U7. TCL and Philips will be adding Dolby Vision 2 support to select TVs later this year.
Dolby Vision 2 is a new dynamic HDR format with a more powerful image engine and expanded metadata compared to its predecessor, Dolby Vision, which came out over a decade ago. It has two tiers: Dolby Vision 2 Max, which will be on this first group of Hisense TVs, and a standard-level Dolby Vision 2.
The Max level includes a motion smoothing feature (Authentic Motion), an updated version of the ambient light sensor adjustment currently found in Dolby Vision IQ, and some pro settings for fine-tuning tone mapping. Max is for higher-end models, while the base level is intended for less expensive, mainstream TVs that don’t have ambient light sensors or the motion processing necessary to drive Authentic Motion. Bidirectional tone mapping, local tone mapping, and intensity slider are all included with the base version of Dolby Vision 2, and will work on existing Dolby Vision content.
Like Dolby Vision, both tiers of Dolby Vision 2 require special hardware; currently the only Dolby Vision 2 SoC is the MediaTek Pentonic 800. Older Dolby Vision TVs without the necessary hardware cannot be updated to use Dolby Vision 2, although they can still display Dolby Vision 2 content and will just ignore the extra metadata.
When Dolby Vision originally came out, many movies and shows were mastered with highlights brighter than the TVs of the time could manage. So the tone mapping engine would take the picture information and fit it into the range the TVs could actually reproduce. But now that some TVs can exceed the brightness of those movie masters (which generally top out between 1,000 and 4,000 nits), Dolby Vision 2’s image engine is able to work in the other direction, too, proportionally increasing the brightness of the content to fully utilize a TV’s light output. Dolby Vision 2 can also use existing metadata to implement other new features, including local tone mapping and contrast adjustment, to take advantage of the increased brightness of today’s TVs.
While the idea of taking advantage of your TV’s full brightness range is intriguing, I worry that boosting brightness beyond the level of the master could deviate from the way the creator wanted their film to be seen. Blade Runner 2049, for instance, is overall a dark film with an average brightness level of around 200–250 nits, even though it’s in the HDR format and available in Dolby Vision. That low brightness gives the film a specific mood. If I were to play that on a Hisense UR9, which can exceed 3,000 nits — or a TCL X11L that I measured at nearly 9,000 nits — would the intended presentation of the film be maintained? The premium TV world is all about most accurately displaying the director’s vision — what they saw in their mind and on the mastering monitor — in our living rooms or home theaters. Once Dolby Vision 2 is readily available, I’m curious to see how drastically the brightness of a title like Blade Runner 2049 might be affected.
There’s also an intensity control that allows the user to adjust the punchiness of the HDR highlights on their TV depending on their viewing conditions, preferences, or contrast perception needs. It sounds similar to the HDR level settings on projectors from companies like JVC and Epson, or the HDR intensity setting in Windows for gaming.
Not all Dolby Vision 2 features will be usable with existing Dolby Vision content. The most interesting, and perhaps most divisive, is Authentic Motion, which lets creatives turn on motion smoothing at a desired intensity for specific scenes or even brief moments, to minimize judder in panning shots or motion blur artifacts in a fast action scene, and then turn it off again to avoid the dreaded soap opera effect in dramatic moments. That’s something that has to be added into the Dolby Vision 2 metadata during post-production; it can’t be put into existing content. “That feature perhaps more than any other needs to be driven by creatively approved decisions,” Jonas Klittmark, Dolby’s director of business and product, told me. “We don’t want to be making anything up when it comes to the motion experience.”
Klittmark also said while Authentic Motion supersedes the television’s motion smoothing software settings, you can always override that and instead use the television’s static motion smoothing settings — or turn it off completely. Making it possible for those dead set against any level of motion smoothing to not use Authentic Motion or the TVs own settings.
Whether or not motion smoothing metadata is needed is up to the content creators to decide (and for forum threads to debate). But having the option there to subtly take away undesired judder or motion artifacts in specific moments, instead of a blanket setting on the TV or nothing at all, has some merit to me.
According to Chris Turkstra, vice president of home devices at Dolby Laboratories, the announced Hisense TVs should be fully updated with Dolby Vision 2 by the end of September, with the vast majority complete by the end of August. But this is still just the beginning of the Dolby Vision 2 rollout. In order to fully utilize Dolby Vision 2, the content needs to be encoded with Dolby Vision 2 metadata during the post-production process.
Right now, Peacock, Canal+, and iQiyi will encode with Dolby Vision 2, and other studios are working on implementing it in their post-production workflows.
There’s also the competing HDR10+ dynamic metadata standard that announced its HDR10+ Advanced update last fall, shortly after Dolby. It includes the same features as Dolby Vision 2 — like enhanced brightness control, local tone mapping, and support for motion smoothing metadata — and is supported by Samsung and Panasonic (two of the founders of the tech), as well as Hisense, TCL, Amazon Prime Video, and Roku. Even though HDR10+ Advanced is royalty-free (Dolby Vision requires a license), I expect Dolby Vision 2 to have wider and more immediate adoption, since companies jumped on Dolby Vision when it came out.
LG and Sony have not yet announced support for Dolby Vision 2, but I expect both will begin including it on some of their 2027 models. (Samsung will never support Dolby Vision because of its investment in HDR10+). Since Dolby Vision 2 requires new TVs, it’ll be a long while before it fully supplants its predecessor in the market. I think Dolby Vision 2 will be nice to have, but since we’re still at the beginning of its implementation, I wouldn’t put off getting a new TV just for it.
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