Dolby Vision?

[Jarman]

Is there any specific technical reason why the Xperia XZ Premium does not offer Dolby Vision support? I am aware that at first Dolby's format required TV sets and media devices to be specifically designed with a Dolby Vision hardware chip, but modern media players SoC's should be able to decode and output Dolby Vision entirely via software.

So might DV still be on the cards from a technical standpoint or Dolby's licensing fees will prevent it from happening? Thanks for any clarification.

[Lord_viridis]

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@Jarman wrote:

Is there any specific technical reason why the Xperia XZ Premium does not offer Dolby Vision support? I am aware that at first Dolby's format required TV sets and media devices to be specifically designed with a Dolby Vision hardware chip, but modern media players SoC's should be able to decode and output Dolby Vision entirely via software.

So might DV still be on the cards from a technical standpoint or Dolby's licensing fees will prevent it from happening? Thanks for any clarification.

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I believe the Dolby vision standard is 12bit colour vs the 10bit of colour on HDR10 which XZ Premium supports.

[JensG]

Hi @Jarman, welcome to the forum!

As you say yourself, there are plenty of factors to take into consideration when deciding whether to implement a new feature or align to another specification. With that said, I'll not speculate further on what could happen, but don't let that stop the discussions. 🙂

What would you say if you had the chance to affect the product plans; is DV a better choise than HDR10 for mobile phones? Do you think supporting more formats would make a great difference? Have you had the chance to try out the HDR video display capabilities already included?

Cheers, Jens

[Jarman]

Hi @JensG, thanks for your warm welcome!

Unfortunately I haven't had the chance to compare the two formats in the mobile space yet, so at the moment I'm not sure DV would look much better than HDR10 on any mobile device. However, I was a bit puzzled as the very first (and currently only) DV mobile phone on the market sports clearly lower specs than the XZ Premium. This is why at first I thought about some sort of licensing issues.

Second of all, I've read that in the TV space Sony models that have the 4K HDR Processor X1 Extreme (such as the X930/X940E, Z9D, and A1E OLED series) will be getting DV. This is also why I thought that, if the XZ Premium had the proper hardware capabilities, maybe DV could still be added if meaningfully different than HDR10.

Needless to say, since you are a developer I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. Thanks for any help!

[JensG]

The XZ Premium has a 4k display, so this far there are few other mobile devices to use for a completely fair comparison. The higher resolution doesn't apply only to how it looks on screen, but also the amount of data to process. 

As of now the HDR10 would be the format with the biggest industry support.

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