The PS5 has a major issue regarding how non-HDR content is displayed, for which no fix is currently available

While many modern games and videos are designed to be displayed in HDR (high dynamic range) format, the PS5 can disable the HDR feature and display content in SDR (standard dynamic range) format instead However, research by Alexander Battaglia and John Linneman of Digital Foundry, a technology analysis brand, has found that doing so does not yield optimal results

The problem is that in SDR mode, the console renders dark areas at a much higher brightness than they should be The best example of this problem comes from YouTuber Tim Rogers, who says that playing Demon's Souls on a PS5 set to display in SDR mode makes his OLED TV look like an LCD TV

According to Linneman's response to Rogers' tweet, the problem is that the PS5 uses a reduced color space when running in SDR mode, which may explain why dark areas look particularly bad when not rendered in HDR The thing is that Why the console does this remains a mystery

Playing games in HDR is one of the PS5's biggest selling points, and since most TVs released in the last few years have this feature as standard, it may not be an issue that affects most PS5 gamers

Furthermore, the PS5 automatically enables HDR even for content that does not support high dynamic range, so unless you are actively looking for this issue, you are unlikely to encounter problems

However, this does not mean that some PS5 owners will not want to playback content in SDR mode This issue could be a particular headache for content creators, since some streaming and recording services do not capture in HDR

Hopefully, this is not a hardware issue that can only be solved with a console refresh, but rather a system update So far, Sony has been rather slow to address the PS5 system software issue, so we may have to wait a while for a fix

While this is definitely an issue, it is unlikely to affect the current demand for the PS5 Sony has been struggling to meet the overwhelming demand for the console since its launch, so if you are still interested in purchasing a PS5, be sure to check out our guide to where to buy a PS5