At long last, people who own Dolby Vision-capable Sony TVs can use them to watch Dolby Vision from 4K Blu-ray discs. This is because Sony has finally 'joined up' its Dolby Vision story by upgrading (in the US, Canada and Europe) one of its 4K Blu-ray players - the UBP-X700 - to support Dolby Vision playback on compatible Sony TVs.
The upgraded X700 is not, of course, the only 4K Blu-ray player to support Dolby Vision playback. Oppo’s 203 and 205 decks have offered it for months, for instance. However, the X700’s Dolby Vision update is the first to provide the elusive extra ‘magic sauce’ firmware that unlocks Dolby Vision 4K Blu-ray playback on Sony TVs that carry the brand's X1 Extreme processor.
No other 4K Blu-ray player so far - including the Oppos - has equipped the specific firmware profile required to handshake properly with Sony’s Dolby Vision-capable TVs over HDMI. In fact, prior to the new X700 update, the only external device that could deliver Dolby Vision over HDMI to upgraded Sony TVs was the Apple TV 4K.
Having checked out X700 update M43.R.0175 myself on an LG OLED77C8, I can confirm that the Dolby Vision support it brings isn’t only designed to work with Sony TVs; it makes the player compatible with all Dolby Vision TVs from any brand.
It also seems that, somehow, Sony's 'bespoke' TV and X700 firmware-based Dolby Vision solution fixes previous DV issues with suddenly raised black levels over HDMI. The black bars above and below known problem scenes never slip into the tell-tale greyness that’s still causing frustration for some LG OLED TV owners (especially owners of the brand’s 2016 OLED sets).
It’s good to see, too, that its Dolby Vision capabilities don’t only apply to the X700’s 4K Blu-ray playback. The X700’s Netflix and VUDU apps also recognize that the player now supports Dolby Vision, and adjust their playback accordingly.
So far, so excellent. Unfortunately, though, as with pretty much every Sony/Dolby Vision update so far, the X700’s new Dolby Vision support isn’t all smooth sailing.
First, unlike other Dolby Vision-capable source devices, an updated X700 can’t automatically detect whether the source you’re watching is playing in HDR10 or Dolby Vision. You manually have to switch its Dolby Vision mode on via the player’s set up menus when you want to watch a DV source.
This isn’t too much of a pain in itself, I guess (though it certainly feels a bit amateurish compared with the automatic HDR format detection of the Oppo players and Apple TV 4K). However, many 4K Blu-rays only reveal that they support Dolby Vision via a tiny logo on the back of their packaging. And we’ve even seen one or two titles released which didn’t provide any external indication that they carried Dolby Vision masters. So it’s all too easy to imagine X700 owners missing out on watching a Dolby Vision version of a 4K Blu-ray film because they simply didn't know it was available.
The lack of auto Dolby Vision/HDR10 switching is arguably even more of an issue with the X700's VUDU and Netflix apps. The thing is, these services carry a mixture of non-HDR, HDR10 and Dolby Vision content. Yet in Netflix’s case in particular, you only get a notification on its menus if a title is available in Dolby Vision if the app detects that it's running on a Dolby Vision-capable device. So with the X700, most users won’t be able to tell if a show they're interested in is available in Dolby Vision on Netflix unless they manually switch the X700’s Dolby Vision mode on to check if the header information for that show changes to say Dolby Vision.
Even more clumsy is the fact that if you activate the Dolby Vision mode on the X700, everything you play on the deck is output to your TV behind a Dolby Vision flag. As a result, even standard dynamic range HD Blu-rays and DVDs are presented to your TV as Dolby Vision sources. Which triggers your TV to go into Dolby Vision playback mode, resulting in pictures that look much brighter than they’re supposed to.
Thanks to this inability of the X700 to automatically switch in and out of Dolby Vision mode, you can’t just switch the mode on and leave it at that. You really are going to have to manually keep toggling DV on and off, with all the faff and potential for missing Dolby Vision sources that entails.
Also potentially frustrating for some users is the way that support for 3D playback is deactivated as soon as you turn Dolby Vision on. It’s hard to understand why this should have to happen, but I guess it’s part and parcel of the way the X700’s Dolby Vision playback mode seems to over-ride almost all of the deck's automatic detection of different playback formats.
Tinkering with the picture settings after applying the Dolby Vision update to my X700 uncovered a bizarre bug, too. If I set the 4K Upscaling Setting to ‘Off’ after switching Dolby Vision on, disc playback became unwatchably plagued by picture freezes every few frames.
I also found the X700's menus would sporadically disappear behind a sea of fuzz with the Dolby Vision setting activated - a problem that could only be fixed by turning the player off and on again.
As if all this wasn’t problematic enough, there are also forum reports (though I haven’t been able to verify this myself) suggesting that switching the X700’s DV support on can cause it to output non-4K discs at 50/60Hz frame rates rather than the correct 24fps.
It should be stressed that none of the X700’s new Dolby Vision-related issues are completely insurmountable or unavoidable. Also, the quality of the Dolby Vision playback when correctly applied to a Dolby Vision source is every bit as lovely as you’d hope.
It would certainly be handy, though, if Sony could find a way to not just iron out the bugs associated with its new X700 Dolby Vision update, but also introduce automatic DV/HDR10 detection at some point down the line…
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