The problem with Sony’s ‘Ready for PlayStation 5’ campaign

At first glance, the new Bravia television campaign ‘Ready For PlayStation 5’ just announced by Sony appears to be obvious and win-win. Sony’s TV division should be rubbing their hands in joy at the prospect of connecting their products to the upcoming release of Sony’s highly anticipated PlayStation 5 console. Especially since, unlike the original PlayStation 4, the PS5 promises to take even the best of the latest TVs to the limit of their capabilities.

The idea that Sony TVs must be particularly good at unlocking the full capabilities of the PS5 is easy to sell. It is not difficult to persuade consumers that the two divisions of the Japanese brand must have worked hand in hand to offer some kind of special synergy between their televisions and consoles.

However, look a little closer, and by selecting just a couple of ranges from its TV 2020 range for ‘Ready for PlayStation 5’ status, Sony has also shed an awkward light on the surprising limitations of other parts of its 2020 TV offer.

That Sony’s new 8K Z8H (US) / ZH8 (UK) TVs comply with the Ready For PlayStation 5 terms outlined in this previous article is not surprising. You would not expect anything less from such an avant-garde television. In fact, with its native 8K resolution, it even supports the 8K output that the PS5 still promises (despite Sony still not showing any 8K content to back up this promise).

However, the fact that the only other range of Sony 2020 TVs that is ready for the Ready For PlayStation 5 category is the mid-range X900H / XH90 series raises some questions. Why this range and not Sony’s flagship 4K 4K models, the X950H / XH9505s? And why are none of Sony’s new OLED A8 / A8H and A9 / A9S OLED TVs for 2020 also getting the nod by PS5?

The practical answer to all this is quite direct. Basically, none of Sony’s new OLED ranges or their XH9505 / X950H sets have HDMI ports / chip sets with enough bandwidth to support the kind of data performance and bi-directional features associated with some of the features Sony deems necessary for full PlayStation 5 support.

We are talking about key things like 4K resolution at 120Hz frame rates; Variable refresh rates to avoid screen tearing (although it actually appears that even the ‘Ready For PlayStation 5’ Z8H / ZH8 8K models may not be compatible with this one); and automatic low-latency mode switching, whereby a television can tell when a game is being fed instead of a video signal, and automatically switch to its game preset.

This automatic game mode switching feature is important because only in its game mode Sony TVs offer their lowest numbers for input lag (the time it takes for a screen to convert incoming image data into a real image ). Obviously, this is a big problem for gamers, who don’t want the time it takes for a TV to display an image to cost them their lives in a twitch reaction FPS game, or miss a jump in a pixel-perfect platformer game. .

In addition to Sony not including support for the above PS5-compatible features on many of its high-end TVs for 2020, it’s also a bit of a disappointment to find even Sony’s Ready For PlayStation 5 models that don’t join other brands to provide some additional game features

For example, it doesn’t appear that Sony is teaming up with LG to offer a ‘HGiG Mode’ that could work with the performance-boosting measures proposed by the HDR Gaming Interest Group between brands (whose goals are discussed here). Measures that ironically led to the HDR calibration menu that Sony added to PS4s via firmware update 7.0.0 almost exactly a year ago …

There has also been no evidence so far to suggest that Sony’s Ready For Playstation 5 models will support NVidia G-Sync or AMD Freesync variable refresh rate systems, although both systems are now compatible with LG’s latest range of OLED TVs. . Instead, it appears that Sony’s Ready for PlayStation 5 models will only get the more general VRR system supporting the HDMI 2.1 standard.

There are also no special gaming features on Sony’s Ready For PlayStation 5 TVs of the type that Samsung has introduced for its 2020 premium TVs either. I’m thinking, for example, of Samsung’s game-friendly motion processing option, which increases motion resolution a bit without increasing input lag as much as motion-related functions normally would. Or there is Samsung’s Dynamic Black Equalizer option, which increases brightness in dark areas of the image without affecting bright areas, so that enemies hiding in dark corners are easier to detect.

In the end, as difficult as Sony’s TV division might be trying to suggest with the Ready For PlayStation 5 initiative that has been working hand in hand with Sony’s console division, it’s hard not to feel that, in truth, Two groups just really started talking together and finding common ground seriously AFTER the technical specification for Sony’s 2020 TV range has already been defined.

The situation becomes even more difficult to understand when you think that the kind of PS5-friendly features that Sony has highlighted as useful for TVs in 2020 were actually widely debated during 2019. In fact, since CES in January 2019, LG captured any another brand in the jump by announcing that it was building a full set of full-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 ports compatible with the next-gen console on its 2019 OLED TVs. And then Sony started including 4K / 120Hz and even 8K conversations on some of his PS5 hype in early 2019.

In other words, Sony’s TV division can hardly claim that it didn’t have many caveats about the kind of features players would expect to have on premium TVs in 2020. I wrote an article on exactly this topic myself in June 2019.

The only explanation I can think of for the odd feature disparities between the different ranges of Sony 2020 TVs is that they are due to some quirks in Sony’s product design and manufacturing system. It is notable in this regard that the X900H / XH90 models use a different chipset than Sony’s new OLEDs and X950H / XH95 LCD games.

However, even if this explanation is correct, it still seems like a rather strange state of television affairs for the brand responsible for the PS5 console. Particularly when you consider that there is a much wider range of games from Samsung and LG, including the 48-inch LG OLED48CX relatively similar to a monitor – it not only has all the really important ‘Ready for PlayStation 5’ features, but also some friendlier tricks for the game.

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