‘Playstation 5 does not display sdr games correctly’
Playing games on the PlayStation 5 in sdr can lead to an incorrect display, especially details in dark or black areas can be lost. According to Digital Foundry, this is the case if high dynamic range is turned off in the PS5 settings.
Among other Alexander Battaglia of Digital Foundry reports that the PS5 does not correctly display original sdr content in this situation, at least with the backwards compatible titles. According to him, there can be black crush, where details in dark or black parts can be lost. Battaglia states that the PS5 uses different black levels, which leads to a different and darker SDR image compared to the same game in SDR on, for example, the PS4, Xbox consoles or the PC. It’s not a huge difference, but it can be negative, he says.
His colleague John Linneman agrees and poses It’s better to leave HDR enabled in the PS5’s settings, as rendering an SDR game in this HDR container will lead to better results, especially if the TV used is relatively good at rendering HDR. There are several users who endorse these experiences, although there are also a few others who indicate that they do not see any issues on their TVs when games are played in SDR.
The issue described here is striking, because rendering an SDR game in an HDR container should logically lead to lesser results, while the original SDR rendering should look better. If hdr is enabled on PS5, everything will be rendered in hdr, including menu interface and sdr games will also be rendered in hdr container. The latter usually does not lead to an optimal display, in which the image is displayed with a standard dynamic range in an HDR image mode of the television. Many recent, larger games support HDR, so players on their PS5 will usually have HDR enabled and thus be more or less forced to play any SDR games in an HDR mode as well, unless they manually change it on a game-by-game basis in the console settings. To adjust.
This is different from how the Xbox Series X and S handle adding HDR to games that didn’t originally include HDR metadata. On the new consoles from Microsoft, a so-called Auto HDR function is available, which uses an algorithm to calculate at the console level how more variation in brightness can be applied and deeper colors can be achieved. In most cases, this leads to an improvement that is reminiscent of a native HDR display.