Dolby Vision 2: What is it and what does it mean for your next TV?

Just when you thought you’d finally made sense of all the jargon on the side of a TV box, another one surfaces.

Dolby — the A/V tech giant whose fingerprints are all over the entertainment industry — recently announced a follow-up to its popular enhanced HDR format, Dolby Vision. It’s called Dolby Vision 2, and soon, you’ll be seeing TVs that carry its certification.

But before you deem your current TV obsolete, let’s go over what Dolby Vision 2 brings to the table and whether or not you need it.

Dolby Vision: a refresher

In a nutshell, HDR (High Dynamic Range) is a format designed to take advantage of the improved capabilities of modern displays. It enhances contrast and color, delivering a better, more-immersive picture.

By default, all HDR-ready TVs support a base-level format called HDR10. In addition, most HDR TVs come with additional, enhanced HDR formats: either Dolby Vision, HDR10+, or both.

These formats work in largely the same way: They leverage dynamic metadata to optimize the picture in real time, presenting it in a carefully controlled manner that ensures that content looks as close to the creator's intent as possible on your own TV.

Dolby Vision is the more popular of the two formats, and there’s a wide array of streaming content, Blu-ray discs and video games mastered for the format. However, its certification comes at a cost for TV-makers, so many TVs support the royalty-free version — HDR10+ — exclusively. You can still find content mastered for HDR10+ across various streaming services (like Amazon Prime Video), but it’s nowhere near as prolific.

Famously, no Samsung TV supports Dolby Vision — not even the best Samsung TVs money can buy. If you watch a Netflix title mastered for Dolby Vision on a Samsung TV, it’ll fall back to HDR10 by default. Depending on the Samsung TV, this could still look stunning, but the TV isn’t dialed into the data that would bring it as close as possible to the creator’s intent.

Which brings me to a crucial point in understanding Dolby Vision, and ultimately, Dolby Vision 2: It only looks as good as the TV itself.

I’ve seen Dolby Vision-certified TVs whose Dolby Vision-enhanced picture looks dark, washed out and otherwise unremarkable, and I’ve seen TVs that don’t support Dolby Vision whose basic HDR performance has left me speechless.

This is because Dolby Vision — and all HDR content — relies on the capabilities of your TV’s hardware. If you buy a so-so TV, prepare for so-so Dolby Vision. The TV box could wear the Dolby Vision label proudly and prominently, but if its subpar picture isn’t that impressive, switching into Dolby Vision mode won’t make it much better.

Here’s an easy, shorthand way to think about all of this: The higher the performance of the TV you’re shopping for, the more you ought to be considering whether or not you need Dolby Vision.

Dolby Vision vs Dolby Vision 2: What’s the difference?

As of September 2025, only a handful of details have been made available about the newest version of Dolby Vision. We’ll update this page as information comes to light, but here’s what we know so far about Dolby Vision 2.

For the first time, the new, enhanced HDR format will give filmmakers the ability to embed scene-by-scene metadata to adjust motion handling on the fly. Dubbed Authentic Motion, Dolby is calling this feature "the world’s first driven creative motion control tool.”

We’ll know more about Authentic Motion in the coming months. I typically recommend that viewers disable motion smoothing on their TV during cinematic content, so I’m curious to see how this dynamic motion control affects the picture.

Another feature new to Dolby Vision 2 is called Content Intelligence. It seeks to give content creators greater flexibility when it comes to showcasing their work on different TVs across varied viewing environments. Or, if you ask Dolby, Content Intelligence is a way to “authentically and automatically optimize your TV to deliver a more captivating picture based on what you’re watching and where you are watching.”

Once again, details remain scarce about Content Intelligence, but Dolby claims that it will leverage the light sensor on TVs to adjust the picture based on ambient lighting conditions. The exact manner in which this differs from Dolby Vision IQ is unclear, but the brand says that it aims to solve the common complaint of conventional Dolby Vision content appearing too dark.

Pretty much everything else is up in the air. It’s not yet known what performance benchmarks the format is designed to meet (though original Dolby Vision supports a peak brightness of up to 10,000 nits — something that no commercially available TV can currently reach).

There’s also a higher-tiered version of this format that will launch alongside it called Dolby Vision 2 Max. In its press release, Dolby says that this version “delivers the best picture on the highest performing TVs,” so we can only assume that it will be made available on the best TVs with the highest performance ceilings.

When can you get Dolby Vision 2 (and do you need it)?

Currently, the only TVs confirmed to carry the Dolby Vision 2 specification are a pair of recently announced Hisense TVs. The Hisense 116UX and 110UX — the first models to feature Hisense’s RGB Mini-LED technology — will also be among the first to support the format.

At the time of publishing, no other TVs (available or otherwise) are confirmed to support Dolby Vision 2 or Dolby Vision 2 Max.

That doesn’t mean that Dolby Vision 2 is too far off. If I were to guess, I’d say that we’ll start seeing support roll out on 2026 TVs.

Hardware is only half of the equation, though. Just as good ol’ fashioned Dolby Vision content needs to be made available by Netflix, game developers and movie studios, so too will Dolby Vision 2 content.

Currently, the only company committed to platforming Dolby Vision 2 content is CANAL+, a French streaming service. Again — this doesn’t mean that Dolby Vision 2 won’t eventually make its way to your go-to streaming service and, eventually, your Blu-ray shelf. It just might take a while to achieve the level of proliferation we see in Dolby Vision.

For now, I’m keeping this space open to provide updated information as it arrives. I’m predicting that we’ll see a flurry of new details at CES 2026, where many TV brands will be unveiling next-year’s most impressive models.

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