Almost a year on from its first unexpected unveiling at the 2025 IFA show in Berlin, Dolby Vision 2 is now rolling out via firmware update to select Hisense TV models across the world. Full details of this roll out can be found in this earlier article, but as I handily have a Hisense UR9 TV in for review at the moment that has already received the Dolby Vision 2 update, I thought I’d share my experience of how this major new feature works in the real world, and what sort of difference it makes to your TV viewing experience.

The first thing I should make clear before going any further is that at the moment, any overview of Dolby Vision 2 as it works in the real world can only be a partial take. This is simply because some of Dolby Vision 2’s features are only unlocked by content mastered with extra Dolby Vision 2 metadata, and while such content is promised by Peacock, Canal+ and iQIYI, it isn’t here yet.

The full menu structure for the Hisense UR9’s top tier Dolby Vision 2 Max version of DV2 is present and correct, though, complete with some interesting quirks and decisions. What’s more, some DV2 features are already capable of making a difference with content that’s been mastered in the original Dolby Vision format, meaning the update can make at least some difference to the Dolby Vision experience Hisense TV owners can enjoy even before DV2 content arrives.

As always with Dolby Vision, the UR9’s Dolby Vision 2 functionality is triggered automatically any time that a Dolby Vision source is played into the TV. However, whereas with the original DV system Dolby Vision menus picture options only appeared once a Dolby Vision signal was detected, with Dolby Vision 2 a new permanent Dolby Vision option appears in the Picture Mode settings menu area, right underneath the top Apply Picture Settings option. It seems a little odd to see this option there even when you’re not playing a Dolby Vision source, but I guess it’s a useful constant reminder that a whole new set of Dolby options are available to you when you need them.

The options available if you select the Dolby Vision menu option vary significantly depending on which DV picture mode you’re using. If you’re not watching a Dolby Vision source, it says as much at the top of the Dolby menu, and the only option available is a video demonstration of what Dolby Vision is about.

If you feed the TV a Dolby Vision signal, the cute Dolby Vision 2 Max logo pops up as playback starts, and the TV then defaults to a Dolby Vision Standard preset. Navigating to the Dolby Vision menus then reveals the following options for this DV mode: A Picture Intensity Slider; the option to switch to a different Dolby Vision preset; a greyed out Authentic Motion option; an Advanced Calibration option; and a Content Optimized Settings option that’s set to off by default.

The Picture Intensity Slider is set to a neutral zero point initially, but you can slide it through five steps left to gradually decrease the image intensity, or five slots right to gradually increase it. Each adjustment “step” tweaks the image across more than 30 different image parameters, providing you with a much more well-rounded and genuinely useful set of results than you would get through any single adjustment option in a TV’s normal menus.

In fact, you could likely play with every available picture feature in a traditional TV menu system forever and not end up with pictures that all look as balanced, rounded and free from distracting miscalculations and overshoots as pretty much all of the options the Intensity Slider gets you. I seriously enjoyed all the Intensity preset option results in their different ways, with their biggest issue actually being that trying them all out in different light conditions and with different content can become quite addictive. Such well balanced and natural effects, to reiterate this point, just shouldn’t be possible from a single simple sliding adjustment.

So far, so good. Next down the Standard DV2 mode options list (skipping over the DV preset choice, which I’ll come back to later) is the Authentic Motion option. This is greyed out unless you first activate the Content Optimized Settings option below it. The only options for Authentic Motion once it’s unlocked, though, are Auto and Off – serving as a reminder that this feature is dependent on new Dolby Vision 2 metadata set to be embedded in new Dolby Vision 2 sources. It’s not a feature that enables the TV to decide for itself what motion compensation processing it might want to apply to content, and nor is it a feature that can be applied to original Dolby Vision content. Your TV’s own built-in motion processing are your only motion options until Dolby Vision 2 content arrives.

This explains why Authentic Motion only becomes live as an option if you have first selected the Content Optimized Settings option, which essentially unlocks the TV’s ability to look for and respond to specific Dolby Vision 2 metadata.

The onscreen description for the Content Optimized Settings option states that “White point, sharpness and motion settings are controlled by the content distributor to optimize the experience” – giving you a nice succinct synopsis of the image parameters that Dolby Vision 2 allows content creators to specifically embed into the metadata of their content. If you don’t want these features to work when playing Dolby Vision 2 content, even though they will have been mastered into the content by the content creators, keep the Content Optimized Settings set to off.

The one other selectable option in the Dolby Vision 2 Standard preset is the Advanced Calibration setting. Activating this basically gives you access to a manual 20pt calibration with overall level (in %) and red, green and blue adjustments.

The only other thing of note on the Dolby Vision Standard options screen is a QR code at the bottom that you can scan if you want to access more information on Dolby Vision content.

The Dolby Vision 2 Game and Custom preset modes both limit the adjustment options to just the Picture Intensity slider. This makes sense in the Game mode, where keeping the screen’s response time as fast as possible typically requires picture adjustments to be kept to a minimum. The Custom setting also only having a single adjustment, however, feels almost bizarrely counter-intuitive. Custom modes usually carry lots of fine tuning options, rather than the bare minimum. Odd. Maybe this will prove to be a part of the Dolby Vision 2 implementation that’s still in development, with further updates to follow.

The longest list of adjustment options actually comes if you select the Pro Reference Dolby Vision 2 preset, marking it out, as its name suggests, as the option of choice both for people looking for the most accurate (to mastering standards) pictures, and serious AV fans happy to tinker more deeply with the way images look.

The options in this mode are a Peak Luminance sliding adjustment, a Minimum Luminance sliding adjustment, an Ambient Light sensor option, and a Precision Black option. Note that the separate Peak and Minimum luminance adjustments replace the single Picture Intensity slider that was available in Dolby Vision Standard mode.

Looking at each option in turn, as you might expect the Peak Luminance slider, which again has five steps up or down from a neutral zero starting position, is described by the UR9’s menus as an “Advanced adjustment [that] tunes the brightest image areas”, while the Minimum Luminance is (you guessed it) an advanced adjustment that tunes the darkest image areas. In other words, Dolby Vision 2’s most comprehensive preset gives you separate control over how the brightest and darkest extremes of the HDR content appear.

Again, the adjustments here work across and balance multiple picture elements rather than just one or two, and from my experience they deliver another excellent set of instant fine-tuning results at the first, second and third levels of adjustment up or down their sliding scales. I did find the effect of each of these sliding settings coming on a bit strong when you get to the far ends of each sliding scale, causing the picture to start to a little flat and, worse, tending to bring out noise in the source signal – or, at least, exaggerate grain.

The self-explanatory Ambient Light sensor option if selected will see the TV adjusting its pictures in response to changes in your room’s lighting conditions. This is a more sophisticated version of the Dolby Vision IQ system Dolby produced previously, and is probably the first such system that I personally would seriously consider regularly using. Especially given how relatively intelligent it is with its dark room calibrations, not leaving the image looking overly dull or affected by black crush as most auto room adjustments do in such conditions.

I think I’d overall still personally stick with just switching between different (tweaked) picture presets for different viewing conditions, but the Ambient Light element of DV2 is absolutely at least worth trying if your TV is likely to be watched in a wide range of very different viewing conditions.

The Precision Black option found in the Pro Reference Dolby Vision menu intriguingly and promisingly enables the TV to read new DV2 metadata provided by content creators that enables them essentially to set shadow detail levels exactly where they want them to be. Given how common it is for TVs to either suffer with lost details in dark areas or else expose more detail than you’re supposed to see, I have great hopes for this feature. But unfortunately, like the Authentic Motion feature, I can’t pass even an early judgement on Precision Black yet as it doesn’t work on current original Dolby Vision content.

At this point I need to report a pretty big bug with the implementation of Dolby Vision 2 on the Hisense UR9. Namely that after I’d played something in Dolby Vision on it and explored the TV’s newly added DV2 options, the TV still seemed to accidentally hold on to some residual Dolby Vision functionality.

So while watching the HDR10 Standard preset I decided I wanted to switch the motion compensation processing from its Smooth default to the much milder Clear or Film options. However, when I tried to select the Motion option in the HDR10 settings menus, a message came up saying I needed to go to the Dolby Vision settings menus and choose “disable content optimised settings”. Yet when I then went to the Dolby Vision menu, the only option available was the Dolby Vision demo video. Because, of course, I wasn’t actually watching a Dolby Vision source.

Switching the TV off and on again did not resolve this issue. In fact, I had to fully unplug the TV to get the correct motion option with HDR10 content to come up. Hisense is looking into this issue as we speak.

While we wait for content mastered in Dolby Vision 2 to arrive, the big question has to be does the premium Max version of Dolby Vision’s second generation actually improve picture quality with existing Dolby Vision content. I have to preface my thoughts on this by saying that since the Dolby Vision 2 update was already present on the UR9 when I first fired it up, I wasn’t able to do direct before and after comparisons. What I can say, though, is that Dolby Vision pictures on Hisense’s TV look fantastic – by a country mile the best pictures I’ve ever seen from any Hisense TV.

More important, though, to potentially judging how much of this quality might be down to Dolby Vision 2 is how much better Dolby Vision 2 images look on the Hisense UR9 than any of its other picture formats. With HDR10+ content (which, like Dolby Vision, adds extra scene by scene image data to the picture stream) the UR9 delivers results that are better than its core HDR10 pictures; but only end up as a sort of a midway point between HDR10 and Dolby Vision 2. The Dolby Vision 2 images still look significantly better – especially when it comes to natural and balanced colour tones. Dolby Vision images on the UR9 also enjoy better shadow detail balance (even though the Precision Black feature isn’t in play), as well as the most consistently effective and distraction-free balance between black level depths, bright highlight punchiness and backlight blooming control.

The difference between the UR9’s pictures in HDR10 mode and Dolby Vision mode is huge. The biggest I’ve ever seen on a premium TV, in fact. In the TV’s HDR10 Standard mode the TV’s own image ‘mapping’ of brightness and especially color often just doesn’t sit quite right, especially (though not exclusively) when it comes to skin tones and muted backdrop shading. The HDR10 Filmmaker Mode option improves the balance and core colour tone issues quite a bit, but the resulting image feels strangely flat and lifeless versus even the DV2 Pro Reference mode for a TV that on paper is capable of 4000+ nits of brightness and extremely wide color coverage.

The unusually extreme difference in picture quality between the UR9’s Dolby Vision 2 and HDR10 pictures remained the same even when I used my Panasonic 4K Blu-ray player options to turn Dolby Vision off so that I could play the same film in HDR10 that I’d just been watching in Dolby Vision.

The original Dolby Vision pretty much always delivers a palpable picture improvement over HDR10 images. However, typically the level of improvement the original Dolby Vision delivers reduces the more premium a TV gets, since premium TVs’ enhanced panel abilities and processing tends to compensate better with HDR10 for the lack of the extra image data Dolby Vision provides. The UR9, though, sits just one step from the very top of Hisense’s 2026 TV range, yet still, thanks it seems to Dolby Vision 2, its Dolby Vision images are not only night and day better than its HDR10 efforts, but good enough to elevate my impressions of Hisense’s TV picture quality potential right up there with the more established TV ‘hero’ brands.

When the opportunity arises to revisit Dolby Vision 2 with content that’s actually been mastered in the new HDR “format”, I will provide an update on my Forbes channel that covers the elements of the system that need to be baked into the content. And if I get the chance to directly compare a specific TV model before and after receiving the DV2 upgrade, I’ll cover that too.

From what I’ve seen from the DV2 upgraded Hisense UR9, though, even though this set’s issues with HDR10 maybe exaggerate the extent of its Dolby Vision 2 image ‘leg up’, Dolby’s long-gestating update to its acclaimed HDR picture enhancement technology looks to have been well worth the wait.

Dolby Vision 2 Arrives On Hisense TVs

Dolby Announces Dolby Vision 2: A New Generation Of Its Acclaimed HDR Picture Enhancement Technology

Samsung Responds To Dolby Vision 2 With New HDR10+ Advanced Standard—And A Major Streamer Is Already Onboard