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PS5 Displays SDR Content in HDR Container
- Thread starter Psychotron
- Start date
Not a fan of this at all. PS5 UX seems horribly underbaked. Hopefully this is changed with a later update.
Last week people thought BC games on PS5 would have choppy compatibility and that only a select few titles would get boosted performance, now we know that every game gets boosted performance, and that BC on the whole works exceptionally well. Just because Sony isn't as loud with marketing certain things, doesn't mean they haven't put some focus on it.
That's been a common theme with Sony on certain tertiary stuff, eg same with input latency with their controllers etc. It's not stuff they advertise or put a name to, it just is.
I'd wait for outlets to test Sony's auto HDR implementation here before deriding it, especially when it's something not a single outlet, journalist or influencer has complained about, despite lots of testing. Though I do agree they should at least have an option not to automate it.
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Do you mind confirming the options available under HDR in the Screen settings menu? I know one is Automatic. What are the others?
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My Sony a1 same thing as when you switch hdmi inputs nothing more.
Split second as it handshakes
Given the very obvious "1.0"-ness of the shipping software I'm sure that this will be something that gets patched in. PS5 OS is definitely coming in hot for launch but I don't think it will be a problem long term, just a sucky inconvenience for the few who were actually able to get a console for launch.
They definitely want to avoid the issues in menus that PS4 had and very likely also want to avoid the switching caused by TVs by switching from HDR to SDR and back.
The easiest way to achieve that is to always enable HDR right now, but then you have more work to do to always reproduce SDR content correctly.
Sony has years of experience with HDR, mastering, tone mapping and so on. Until someone tests it properly, I'm more likely to assume they got it right.
consumer tech is so fucking frustrating at the moment lol
I feel like there is an inherent flaw in how hdr standards were created for this to even be an issue
then there's the whole hdmi 2.1 nightmare of nothing just working properly or devices only implementing some features
and usb 3/c/thunderbolt is a whole other one
I feel like there is an inherent flaw in how hdr standards were created for this to even be an issue
then there's the whole hdmi 2.1 nightmare of nothing just working properly or devices only implementing some features
and usb 3/c/thunderbolt is a whole other one
I'f be surprised if they take it much above 300-400 nuts to be honest, the goal probably not to create an "HDR effect" as xbox is doing, it's to help the SDR content sit alongside HDR content.
Many users using a set in SDR mode will probably have an image similarly Bright. So I wouldnt be concerned about that.
Hopefully they will have. Setting like in Windows which allows you to adjust that brightness
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Yes but there's still the issue of TV settings themselves. On my 900E my brightness is at max for HDR content. SDR sits at 15. Even if they output a low nit value for the menu, my tv will still be set to max brightness, right? Theres also local dimming and Xtended range settings that I have different for HDR. It makes a big difference on my tv's picture.
It's always frustrating to see something that worked just fine in the previous gen get messed up in the new gen. Now I'll have to maintain a list of games that actually have HDR support and turn off HDR unless I'm playing one of them.
Have you seen some of the poor/fake HDR blu-rays with nothing in the HDR nits? They don't get blown out and become overly bright even when your TV is in HDR mode.
Blade runner 4k blu ray brightness is no different in HDR with your TV in HDR, vs. in SDR (blu-ray) with your tv in SDR.
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If there's a "paperwhite" setting OS wide that sets the luminance for SDR content then I think I could live with that (although I'd still prefer the PS4/Xbox One solution). If there's no user control and you're beholden to whatever luminance levels for SDR that Sony see fit then that's really not a good solution. I look forward to any hands on testing you're able to do. Will be good to see how bright highlights get to in the OS, hopefully Sony haven't gone and added 1000 nits highlights in there.
If there's a "paperwhite" setting OS wide that sets the luminance for SDR content then I think I could live with that (although I'd still prefer the PS4/Xbox One solution). If there's no user control and you're beholden to whatever luminance levels for SDR that Sony see fit then that's really not a good solution. I look forward to any hands on testing you're able to do. Will be good to see how bright highlights get to in the OS, hopefully Sony haven't gone and added 1000 nits highlights in there.
Now I can't decide what I want first - folders, game swap, or a toggle to address this. At least we'll get more than stability updates for awhile. This OS is definitely coming in hot.
What is the significance in needing to remove that black screen change from SDR to HDR with the HDR logo appearing? Will watch the video soon. I guess the smoother transition. But like, I didn't see this as an issue. If the content is SDR, it is what it is, of course.
I agree that there should be a toggle. I recently purchased the new Chromecast with Google TV, and I wasn't a fan of how flat the colors looked on the home screen, so I turned on a similar feature to make the colors pop more. While it made the home screen look fantastic by enabling HDR, it applied the same effect to all of the content I watched, and skin tones in particular (even on The Simpsons) looked absolutely terrible.
in HDR mode that just means the back light can re a b max brightness if requires by the content. The dimming means that the brightness will rarely be at "max". They shouldn't really have a backlight option to use when in HDR mode.
I think the issue might be that transitions back and forth from a HDR game to an SDR OS may not be as smooth or fast on TVs that have those transitions to apply different sets of settings. So the experience can suffer signifciantly.
It's not the source that's increasing the brightness... It's your TV's settings. It doesn't matter if it's an empty HDR signal. Your TV is still going to go into HDR mode where the brightness, contrast, and backlight settings are well above what they are in SDR.
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The tv is set to max brightness so that in HDR it can hit those peaks. If the tv is just displaying SDR content in that mode it probably won't ever hit that high brightness, but obviously if you find the resulting image to be too dim you can't up the brightness and if you find it too bright you're now changing settings that you'd need to switch back when displaying proper HDR content.
That feels like a non excuse when you can just make the OS compatible with both HDR and SDR signals. I'm pretty sure the PS4 does it. I don't remember any black screens when going back and forth befeeen the Home Screen and an HDR game. The only time that black screen would pop up was when the game launched.
just to make sure I wasn't crazy I checked. Booted up my PS4: OS is in SDR. Launched Spider-Man: tv went into HDR mode in game. Pressed the PlayStation button to go back to the OS: OS is in HDR. Only when I manually closed the game did it go into a quick black screen on the OS, but when the game was running in the background everything was seamless. The only time you'd get that flicker would be when switching from an HDR app to an SDR app or vice versa.
if the PS4 can do it there's no excuse.
God I hate this one step forward, two steps back approach to next-gen UI design and features. People have been complaining about it, but the approach Microsoft took to using the exact same interface that's running on Xbox One was absolutely the right call. We'll probably be waiting 1-2 years for the PS5 to match feature parity with the PS4 if the last gen is any indication.
Yeah i mixed about this
I love PS UI, and i looove having a new one . Feels more next gen. Buuuuuut if that means removing features..... i would stick with an old UI. HDR switch and Folders are missing and this aint small
Patch notes for PS5 games are also missing apparently. Not having folders is genuinely inexcusable, especially with how the interface only displays like 10 games at a time it seems.
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Take a look at the menus while Spider-Man is running in HDR - what do you notice? Right, there are color distortions and fine text is not always perfectly legible.
Also, switching between SDR and HDR picture modes may be something Sony wants to get rid of. It visibly interrupts direct loading (which is now extremely fast) in games and applications.
I also hope that there is an option to toggle this behavior, because there are televisions that manage these picture modes completely nonsensically, but it is not generally a problem as some make it look like here.
lol but the experience of your game looking bad/off the entire time you play it is way worse than "oh no the screen blanked before i launched my game"
Completely agree. When I was younger I wouldn't mind configuring/troubleshooting this stuff, but now that I'm older with 2 kids, regular job, freelance work, etc...I just want my tech to work properly when I actually get the time to sit down and play a game.
And when I was a kid, I didn't care about this fancy tech at all, lol. It was just about the games.
I'm getting anxious just reading through this thread. It took me forever to figure out the hdr/rgb range handshake issue the PS4 Pro had with my LG oled.
Speaking of that, I wonder if that's part of the reason Sony is using an HDR container this time? To avoid those rgb range handshake issues?
For those who don't know, there was an issue with PS4's auto setting for rgb range with some tvs.
When you leave it on auto, the PS4 will default to Full RGB for SDR, but drops to limited RGB for HDR (limitation of HDMI 2.0).
I can't remember the LG default for black level (I believe it's low), but essentially the PS4 doesn't handshake properly with the tv when it makes the change from Full RGB to limited.
The fix was to either manually set your PS4's rgb settings to limited AND set the tv's black level to the same. OR manually set the PS4's rgb settings to full, set the tv black level to high. Then launch an HDR game and make sure the tv switches modes. Then (after confirming the tv is in hdr), set the tv's black level to low.
On some TVs like my old Samsung, HDR is more straightforward since it automatically sets the correct black level for you (my TV literally locks out the TV's black level setting when dealing with YUV). Sadly, this only affects the PS4 Pro. Regular PS4s output HDR in 1080p RGB so my Samsung requires one to properly set it, so that's another confusing point to add lol.
I was told that we should always use limited though. While I always believed that limited/limited and full/full gave the same output and were correct, I recently discovered that my PS3 would give 4 different types of output depending on how you had settings set, and limited/limited was the only one that was correct.
I have no clue what you're seeing when you say text is hard to read. That's just completely false and HDR v SDR shouldn't make text and more or less legible. As for colors I'm sure the UI isn't perfectly calibrated for HDR and probably looks off, but it's a fucking UI. I'm not really concerned about whether my blue background looks right or wrong. I'd much rather have the UI be compromised than the actual game or content.
Some TVs will accept the Full range, but are really built to handle Limited the best. I know my C9 is like this, and will set my PS5 accordingly.
The baffling thing is patch notes ARE supported, they're there for PS4 games. But when you're looking at a PS5 game the option just doesn't exist.
I'll have to wait to see how it's tonemapped to judge for myself, but in my experience this always looks worse than displaying SDR content in SDR mode. Only thing giving me hope is John from DF saying he thought it looked good. Initial thoughts are that I'm not a fan of this at all and I hope it can be disabled, otherwise this is going to be even worse than my problem with the HDR solution on the Xbox side. Frankly I thought PS4 had the perfect HDR implementation.
Yeah, completely false... because chroma subsampling does not actually exist. The PS4 is only capable of 4K/60 + HDR at 4:2:0 or 4:2:2, that's not optimal for plain text if you don't account for it. I didn't say it happens all the time but it is an existing issue. If they enable HDR system-wide, everybody would have to account for that, because the can't assume everybody uses a HDMI2.1 TV with 4:4:4/RGB.
That the menu is not "calibrated" perfectly is not completely wrong, but has little to do with actual calibration. The menu is in the SDR color and brightness space and the PS4 does not tonemap this correctly at this point while an application is running in HDR-Mode. Sony has never changed that, although of course it would theoretically be possible - if they enable HDR system-wide and implement it properly, then they have solved that problem on the PS5.
If you want to see it fundamentally negative, you could say Sony is trading several existing potential problems for new potential problems. I assume that they will offer options (possibly with a delay) to counteract this.
This really ought to be optional, due to the number of issues it can cause.
Properly calibrated, both should be outputting 100 nits when displaying SDR content, but the backlight on the LCD is cranked up so that it's capable of producing 700 nits or more. This can effectively make the black level 7x higher than it would be if running SDR content natively.
Of course higher-end sets will have local dimming which reduces how much of an issue that is, but it's a real problem.
It also prevents people running SDR out-of-spec, which many prefer; running in wide gamut mode, pushing the brightness far beyond 100 nits, adjusting the gamma to see shadow detail more easily in a bright room etc.
It doesn't sound like there's a brightness control for this either.
The "daytime viewing" section of this comparison (10:02) is most-relevant:
John is using an OLED so it's not subject to the main problem of SDR inside an HDR container: reduced contrast on LCD because HDR runs the backlight at 100%.
Properly calibrated, both should be outputting 100 nits when displaying SDR content, but the backlight on the LCD is cranked up so that it's capable of producing 700 nits or more. This can effectively make the black level 7x higher than it would be if running SDR content natively.
Of course higher-end sets will have local dimming which reduces how much of an issue that is, but it's a real problem.
It also prevents people running SDR out-of-spec, which many prefer; running in wide gamut mode, pushing the brightness far beyond 100 nits, adjusting the gamma to see shadow detail more easily in a bright room etc.
It doesn't sound like there's a brightness control for this either.
The "daytime viewing" section of this comparison (10:02) is most-relevant:
Shouldn't make a difference if the actual light output is the same.
New DF video just dropped of the PS5 review and Rich said it looks particularly impressive so i think it'll be fine
Isn't the video you posted is showing that there IS a difference when running SDR within an HDR wrapper? Vincent is using an OLED and pointing out all the inaccuracies
I only said that OLED avoids the main problem - which is the potential for greatly reduced contrast on LCD.
It's still much worse than a native SDR output on any display.
It seems like a lot of people like the way it looks so I don't think its a bad thing to have it but they should definitely have an option to turn it off for folks who don't want it and to just have something like the PS4
True, I would probably ultimately prefer it work like PS4 did. Whether they'll add that option, we'll just have to wait and see.