If you thought Micro RGB would be the only new TV tech proliferating throughout TV lineups in 2026, think again. Dolby Vision 2 is also coming to many new TVs this year. Hisense announced its intention to support the technology in 2025, with Philips and TCL joining the party at CES this week.

First unveiled in September 2025, Dolby Vision 2 promises to alleviate some of the flaws in the original proprietary protocol; namely, Dolby Vision’s overly dark scenes, which will be corrected with an AI-powered feature Dolby calls Precision Black. AI will also redeem the original protocol’s unrealistic sports and video game rendering, via Dolby Vision 2’s Sports and Gaming Optimization, which promises to deliver both malleable white point and motion info.

Motion artifact reduction, meanwhile, will be handled by an Authentic Motion element of the protocol, but that feature will be limited to an advanced version called Dolby Vision 2 Max and will likely be found only on higher-end TV models.

Additionally, Dolby Vision 2 will adjust the entire color and contrast scheme according to ambient lighting conditions, though obviously this will only work on TVs with ambient light sensors.

What’s all this about metadata? Well, Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HDR10+ are relatively small streams of data that piggyback on the actual picture data stream and tell a TV that understands them how to render the content. This can be as granular as frame by frame (in the case of HDR10+ and Dolby Vision 1 and 2), or all at once up front, as with HDR10.

Caveats

Dolby Vision 2 will only deliver its benefits with content that was created with it. (the movie studio Canal+ was among the first to announce support for it). There was a bit of a brand-war noise at the onset of this piggyback metadata technology, but it was so easy (and free) for content creators and publishers to implement all the protocols, that it became a tempest in a teapot. Hopefully, it will be the same this time around.

That said, Samsung will undoubtedly stick with the royalty-free HDR10/HDR10+, as it has in the past. Meanwhile, both LG and Sony have been mum about implementing the new tech; however, if Dolby Vision 2 lives up to the hype and catches buyer’s attention, both industry giants are sure to follow at some point.

Sadly, Dolby Vision 2 won’t be an upgrade for existing TVs that support Dolby Vision, as the tech requires new hardware. For now, that means new TVs equipped with a MediaTek Pentonic 800 with MiraVision Pro PQ Engine chipset.

Author: Jon L. Jacobi, Contributor, PCWorld