Dolby Shifts Shipping Date for First Dolby Vision TV to Early 2015

Dolby didn’t immediately respond to questions about a change in plans to ship a Dolby Vision TV this year, after a comment by CEO Kevin Yeaman on an earnings call Thursday saying the company now expects to ship the first Dolby Vision TV “early in calendar 2015.” Yeaman said Dolby Vision can “enhance the imaging experience across a wide range of use cases” and that in the coming year the company will continue efforts to build out the Dolby Vision ecosystem, including content creation, delivery and playback. At IFA, Dolby showed a simulation of Dolby Vision (see 1409040067) comparing a standard TV to one with Dolby Vision enabled by an offline mapping solution through a computer. Actual Dolby Vision TVs will have the algorithm built in, the company said. At the time, Dolby was working with silicon vendors to integrate Dolby Vision into a chipset for real-time mapping, with Sigma Designs slated as the first vendor with a system on a chip (SoC) integrating Dolby Vision natively, according to Roland Vlaicu, Dolby vice president-consumer imaging. The SoC was due out early next year, Vlaicu said, but the first Dolby Vision TVs were expected to use more expensive field-programmable gate-array chip solutions. Mary Miller, Sigma Design senior director-corporate marketing, said at IFA that the company’s SX7 SoC could accommodate Dolby Vision, but it wasn’t expected to be deployed for Dolby Vision TVs until after the January CES. Dolby is pitching Dolby Vision as a technology that makes “spectacular highlights” look closer to what they look like in real life, Vlaicu said at the time. Combining high dynamic range and wider color gamut allow more saturated colors at higher brightness levels, he said. “Today, if you want to show a bright area of the image, because of the limited range you have, you have the choice of either showing it in a saturated way that’s fairly dim, or you show it bright, but then unavoidably, all the colors start to gravitate toward the white point, which means they start to get washed out,” he said.