CES 2026: Dolby Vision 2 and HDMI 2.2 largely a no show for this year

Modern TVs are not just about the display technology their screens are built around – in fact, in terms of both functionality and picture quality it’s fair to say that other areas of these devices, such as connectivity and controlling software, prove themselves to be more important in the context of everyday use than the panel employed by any given TV set. This is why yours truly, among other people keenly interested in home television development, was looking forward to news about HDMI 2.2 and Dolby Vision 2, the latest versions of two important standards promising to bring advanced connectivity and color accuracy to future TVs.

Both were basically a no show at CES 2026.

In the case of HDMI 2.2: absolute silence. The new standard was announced at last year’s CES, then we got a more detailed look at its specs and new capabilities back in June and then… nothing. No news about it for the rest of the year, no news about it in last week’s CES either. The only thing mentioned in some outlets were some prototype HDMI 2.2 96Gbps cables shown at the HDMI Licensing Administrator’s booth and that’s about it.

This means that, crucially, we got no word on when the tech specs of the new standard are expected to be finalized, so that chipset manufacturers can start working on controlling chips. The HDMI 2.2 timeline, as a result, remains as vague as ever. In fact, the way things are going, consumers should probably not be expecting any TVs, receivers, projectors, graphics cards etc. making use of the new standard before mid-to-late 2027 at the earliest, assuming that its technical specifications are set in stone before fall 2026.

Dolby Vision 2 was also largely absent in this year’s CES: maybe not a huge surprise considering that it was announced this past September, but not what consumers interested in picture quality and color accuracy would like to see from TV manufacturers either. All we got was re-confirmation that Hisense will be supporting the new standard on certain 2026 RGB LED TV models – via a firmware update – after their release, as well as confirmation that TP Vision Philips will be doing the same on three of its OLED TV lines later in the year.

It’s worth pointing out that Dolby Vision 2 requires an appreciably capable chipset in order to work as intended – which, in MediaTek’s case, is the Pentonic 800 or Pentonic 1000 for 4K TVs (Pentonic 2000 is designed for 8K TVs which are not exactly hot at the moment). So, if Sony and Panasonic plan to support Dolby Vision 2 in their 2026 flagship LCD LED or OLED TVs, they will have to switch to either Pentonic chipset, which they may or may not do (yours truly’s money is on the latter but he’d definitely like to be surprised).

LG did not talk about Dolby Vision 2 at all during CES 2026. Although that’s not necessarily a sign of the company’s intentions to not support it in future LED LCD and OLED models, it’s most probably an indication of it not planning to do so this year. Sitting back to see what others are planning to do, maybe?

Samsung never supported Dolby Vision, so nobody expect them to do that with Dolby Vision 2, especially not after proposing their own alternative, HDR10 Plus Advanced. Samsung mentioned this new standard – announced back in November – in one of its press releases, but did not go into detail regarding what consumers can expect of it in terms of picture quality enhancements.

Since there’s no content available yet configured in a way that leverages either Dolby Vision 2 or HDR10 Plus Advanced, it will be a while before we get to see what either standard is capable of. Peacock is the first and only streaming service so far planning to offer movies and TV shows taking advantage of Dolby Vision 2 later this year. Will we have to wait for CES 2027 in order to learn more on both HDMI 2.2 and Dolby Vision 2? Hopefully not – but few would actually be surprised if we did, no?