Dolby Vision on Xiaomi’s Phones
Still, looking for the best HDR format? Xiaomi 11 Pro & Ultra & Youth Edition and MIX Fold are the first phones in China to support Dolby Vision format. What is Dolby Vision? What can Dolby Vision bring? What are the advantages of Dolby Vision? What exactly does Dolby Vision do?
If taking HDR photos with your phone is about “preserving” the real world as much as possible from the dark to the highlights, then playing HDR format video on your screen is about “restoring” the video you shot and produced as perfectly as possible. In terms of HDR video formats, we recommend watching Dolby Vision from Dolby Laboratories because Dolby Vision is the highest specification HDR format available.
Xiaomi is the first Chinese cell phone brand to support Dolby Vision technology. The Xiaomi 11 Pro, Xiaomi 11 Ultra, Xiaomi 11 Youth Edition, and Xiaomi MIX Fold, which were announced at Xiaomi’s spring event, all support Dolby Vision.
The essence of Dolby Vision is “Better Pixels”
Before we talk about why we chose Dolby Vision, let’s first introduce what Dolby Vision is. As mentioned earlier, Dolby Vision is an HDR format, so videos in Dolby Vision format can provide extremely high brightness, contrast, detail, and rich color performance for a rich and stunning sensory experience.
To put it simply, the familiar way to enhance the video experience is to use “more pixels”, that is, higher resolution, such as increasing the resolution to 4K, 8K or even better, and the other dimension is “faster pixels”, that is, increasing the frame rate, such as increasing a 24 fps movie to 120 fps.
Dolby Vision brings a newer dimension, offering “better pixels”, that is, higher dynamic range and wider color gamut, with theoretical brightness of up to 10,000nit and support for 12bit color depth.
Compared to a single high specification, Dolby Vision can be seen as the last piece of the puzzle that completes the bucket. High resolution, high frame rate, high dynamic range, and wide color gamut are all planks, thus forming a bucket without shortboards and thus a comprehensive experience that surpasses previous traditional specifications.
What problem has Dolby Vision solved? Darker, brighter, richer, and more vivid colors.
Restricted by traditional video transmission and theater standards, most of the video content we see today has been produced and played back in a narrow color gamut and brightness range for quite some time, such as in the most common current TV and Blu-ray content in the SDR standard, with a maximum brightness of 100 nits and minimum brightness of 0.117 nits.
Yet nature has a wider color and luminance range than most current broadcast, Blu-ray, and theater systems support. Taking the flower below as an example, in the actual environment, the darkest part is the background image with a brightness of 145nit, while the brightest part is the yellow part of the petals, which reaches 14700nit, a brightness gap of 100 times between the light and dark parts.
This brightness and darkness gap is far beyond the range supported by the traditional SDR format, reflected in the viewer’s eyes is the lack of color, black white dark parts can not go down, the highlights are dark, not bright enough and other problems.
SDR content limit has been lower than the current playback device can provide brightness, playback devices in the display of SDR content, the simple solution is simply brutal stretching brightness, surface brightness pulled up, but the black field display worse, the the the high brightness part is still no detail.
Dolby Vision’s approach is to directly broaden the current light and dark contrast and color volume. With the increased contrast, it is possible to display more light and dark variations and rich colors.
For example, on a TV with a brightness limit of 100nit (the upper limit of the SDR standard), the brightest blue color would only be 7nit, so it would never be able to show the brightness of a true blue sky. The Dolby Vision standard, Xiaomi 11 Pro, and Xiaomi 11 Ultra up to 1700nit peak brightness can more accurately restore the true colors, and in the future, as the screen brightness increases, the peak brightness of Dolby Vision can even reach 10000nit.
The appearance of Dolby Vision allows dark details to be retained, highlights can support higher brightness while still having details and levels, and bright light sources like flames, which are easily lost because they exceed the brightness limit, are also truly retained in Dolby Vision.
Compared to ordinary images, Dolby Vision can bring colors that have never been seen on screen before. The brightness of bright parts can be increased by up to 40 times, and the darkness of dark parts can be increased by up to 10 times, and what the audience feels is brighter colors framed with darker dark fields, creating a more vivid and realistic picture.
Professional and delicate production, can not be separated from the professional cell phone screen
What really makes Dolby Vision a better experience is the increasing amount of Dolby Vision content, including movies, TV series, and more.
Why is the Dolby Vision format of movies and TV shows more outstanding in the viewing experience? The most important point is that Dolby Vision supports dynamic metadata. The so-called dynamic metadata is the ability to set the most appropriate brightness, contrast, color, and other picture effects for each scene of video content individually, rather than using a fixed parameter throughout, which is the most important difference between Dolby Vision and HDR10 format.
Dolby Vision can help content creators meticulously color-code every scene of a film or TV show to achieve their creative intent, and content in Dolby Vision format is used in production, distribution, and playback at the end.
However, for consumers of content, the choice of the terminal is the most important, and directly restricts the viewing effect is the device used for playback in our hands
The most important choice for content consumers is the device we use for playback, such as the cell phone screen that is always in everyone’s hands.
The upper limit of the screen quality directly determines the playback effect of Dolby Vision format content. For HDR formats such as Dolby Vision, higher peak brightness and color support can deliver a better visual experience, and MIX Fold comes out on top in another dimension with a huge display area of 8.01″ when unfolded.
The support of Dolby Vision is inseparable from the high standard requirements of Xiaomi phones in terms of screen specifications. By playing content in Dolby Vision format, Xiaomi phones represented by Xiaomi 11 Ultra and MIX Fold are equipped with professional-grade specifications such as high brightness, high color accuracy, and 10bit, and achieve a vivid, bright and colorful visual effect on the phone.