Dolby now making video technology for gaming, broadcast, and streaming (Dolby Vision)

[GoodBytes]

Dolby Laboratories known for their audio technology, which has a goal to provide the best audio cinematic experience. Now it wants to improve video output.

Polygon says:

Announced today, Dolby Vision is designed bring "true-to-life brightness, colors, and contrast" to video signals encompassing broadcast, gaming and streaming content — including services found on modern gaming consoles.

According to Dolby, current "color-grading standards are based on the limitations of old technologies." Dolby Vision will allow televisions with the technology to display a wider range of brightness, color and contrast.

The technology will be showed at CES passing right now, and consumer offering will be available in 2015.

Dolby list of "expected" content partners contains Amazon Instant Video, Netflix and Microsoft Xbox Video. Sharp, TCL and Vizio are showing products with the technology at CES 2014 this week. Consumer devices using Dolby Vision are expected in 2015.

From The Verge, explaining the idea of what Dolby is getting at;

Dolby’s executive director of technology strategy, television imagery has been held back by standards that lost their relevance long ago, and the easiest way to understand that is to look at brightness. Currently video is created and displayed using a reference peak brightness level — and it’s much too small. The unit of measurement is colloquially‎ known as a "nit", and CRT displays back in the day had an average peak brightness of 100 nits; that’s still the same reference level used today. Modern day televisions take that signal and stretch it to match their own peak brightness (usually between 400–500 nits), but that has its limits. If you take the image much brighter, it starts to fall apart.

The problem is that the human eye is used to seeing a much wider range in real life. The sun at noon is about 1.6 billion nits, for example, while starlight comes in at a mere .0001 nits; the highlights of sun reflecting off a car can be hundreds of times brighter than the vehicle’s hood. The human eye can see it all, but when using contemporary technology that same range of brightness can’t be accurately reproduced. You can have rich details in the blacks or the highlights, but not both.

[...]

Source: http://www.polygon.com/2014/1/6/5281016/dolby-vision

Source 2 and more about it: http://www.theverge.com/2014/1/6/5276934/dolby-vision-the-future-of-tv-is-really-really-bright

[MatheusSanzo]

I'm not really sure how I feel about it, but it sounds cool if that means that we will have a better experience in general with the certified products.

[Kuzma]

Dolby generally do very well when they create a standard so I'm very interested about this personally.