First proper hands-on account of Dolby Vision 2 running on a shipping Hisense UR9 is out, and the useful takeaway is not the headline features. Authentic Motion sits greyed out in the menu. Precision Black is waiting too. Both need content mastered with the extra DV2 metadata, and that content does not exist yet on any service you can subscribe to today. Peacock, Canal Plus and iQIYI have all been named as coming, with no dates attached.
So what does the firmware actually do for you right now? Two things, and they only work on content mastered in the original Dolby Vision format. The Picture Intensity Slider starts at a neutral zero and moves five steps in either direction, with each step reportedly moving more than 30 image parameters at once rather than just pushing a brightness control. And the ambient light handling has been reworked. That is it. Everything else in that menu is a placeholder for a future you have paid for in advance.
Which is fine, honestly, as long as nobody is buying a UR9 this month expecting the demo reel version of DV2. It is a firmware update on a TV you already own, it does not cost anything, and the reported improvement on existing DV content over the same material in HDR10 was described as dramatic on colour, shadow detail and overall balance. Take it.
The part that nags at me is the shape of this rollout. A format that only fully switches on when three named streaming services get around to remastering is a format that lives or dies on whether Netflix and Disney Plus bother. Anyone heard either of them commit to DV2 metadata?
So what does the firmware actually do for you right now? Two things, and they only work on content mastered in the original Dolby Vision format. The Picture Intensity Slider starts at a neutral zero and moves five steps in either direction, with each step reportedly moving more than 30 image parameters at once rather than just pushing a brightness control. And the ambient light handling has been reworked. That is it. Everything else in that menu is a placeholder for a future you have paid for in advance.
Which is fine, honestly, as long as nobody is buying a UR9 this month expecting the demo reel version of DV2. It is a firmware update on a TV you already own, it does not cost anything, and the reported improvement on existing DV content over the same material in HDR10 was described as dramatic on colour, shadow detail and overall balance. Take it.
The part that nags at me is the shape of this rollout. A format that only fully switches on when three named streaming services get around to remastering is a format that lives or dies on whether Netflix and Disney Plus bother. Anyone heard either of them commit to DV2 metadata?
