The PS5 is Sony’s not-so-secret weapon. It’s dominated the latest generation of console gaming (in part because Xbox self-destructed), but there’s no doubting Sony is top of the pile.
If someone could tell this to the Sony Home Cinema TV division.
Despite this upside and the advantage Sony has baked in, the TV division hasn’t jumped on board to cement it. In fact, its whole approach to gaming drives me loopy. I can’t see any direction to it, but worse than that, I can’t see any interest in gaming.
I thought Sony’s latest TVs, from the Bravia 2 II and 3 II, to its forward-looking RGB models in the Bravia 9 II and Bravia 7 II might change that. But I was a fool to think so.
No, this is not about HDMI 2.1
A little tangent, if I may, while I fire cannonball broadsides at others.
I don’t understand this obsession with TVs needing to have four HDMI 2.1 inputs. Whenever articles about Sony Bravia TVs and gaming crop up, it’s usually about the lack of HDMI 2.1 inputs.
Perhaps I’m dim and don’t understand the upside, but this seems to be the oddest hill to die on with regard to TVs. While LG and Samsung have supported four HDMI 2.1 inputs for several years now (thanks to developing their own chips that allow it), the actual need for the average customer to have four HDMI 2.1 ports on their TV seems remote. Two HDMI 2.1 inputs are more than fine.
It’s not as if, since the introduction of HDMI 2.1, there have been a variety of products that have supported it. There are sound systems with the eARC provision but some still support Dolby Atmos without support for HDMI 2.1. There are a few media streamers that support the standard and all the current gaming consoles do. Unless you want to throw in AV receivers/amplifiers into the mix, the variety of sources is not considerable.
There aren’t many devices that utilise 120Hz refresh rates either – even the Nintendo Switch 2 tops out at 4K/60Hz. There are no 4K Blu-ray players because they don’t even need to support 120Hz. The PS5 itself has about 100+ games that run at 120fps, but a considerable amount only do so at resolutions lower than 4K. You don’t need HDMI 2.1 for Dolby Vision or HDR10+ either.
Look at the gaming market and the PS5 has dominated as Xbox fell behind in sales. Microsoft has moved to publishing its own first-party games on other platforms, and cloud gaming is becoming more prevalent. Do you need two games consoles to plug in? Not any more.
So the whole obsession with four HDMI 2.1 and 120Hz seems to be exactly that. A large percentage of TV buyers won’t need HDMI 2.1 – they might not even know about it… so again. In this streaming age where viewers are tapping directly into apps, this is a weird criticism that keeps popping up over and over.
‘Ok for PlayStation 5’
Ok, back to the scheduled programming.
Sony TVs don’t care about the PS5… is a sensational headline I could probably use, but it wouldn’t exactly be true. Sony TVs do care about the PS5 – they just don’t seem to care very much.
Five years ago, Sony launched its Perfect for PlayStation 5 features. These are exclusive features only Sony Bravia XR TVs can unlock. The idea is that they automatically adjust and optimise the picture without requiring (much of) your input. It doesn’t do anything with sound, and it doesn’t really integrate into the interface of Bravia TVs.
The Auto Genre Picture Mode is a fancy way of describing ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode). This is performed on the console itself, so rather turning on a PS5 and game mode being activated forever more until you turn off the console, as I understand it, the PS5 will call up game mode only for when you’re playing games.
As soon as you watch a film, TV series or UHD Blu-ray (on the console itself), it’ll switch back to Standard mode (or whatever your preferred picture mode is). Fair enough, but hardly exciting.
Auto HDR Tone Mapping is more interesting as it incorporates HDMI 2.1’s SBTM (Source-Based Tone Mapping). It takes information from the TV in terms of its HDR performance and the PS5 automatically calibrates its HDR output in response. Doesn’t matter whether you have super-bright Bravia TV or a low-brightness model – this feature can optimise the performance for your TV. Clever, and if there were any new 4K players that took advantage of the 2.1 spec, I’d love for them to add this feature.
The last feature is… 4K/120fps, which as I alluded to above, there aren’t many games that output at 4K/120fps. To call it a feature seems generous.
As you can see, there isn’t much to the Perfect for PlayStation 5 features that meets the eye. The SBTM feature you can do manually with other TVs during the setup/power-on of the PS5 with a new TV. There’s very little here that can’t be done in some way or other on models from other TV brands. Even more curious, these are the same set of features from five years ago. Sony has not added to or updated this list.
The PS5 has bulldozed through the gaming market but the Sony TV division seems like a truculent horse that doesn’t really want to follow in its wake. Given the competitive advantage, the Sony TV division has sat back rather than capitalised on it.
And it goes both ways. While several Bravia TVs support Dolby Vision Gaming, the PS5 still does not while its Xbox rivals do. This is a confusing state of affairs, not helped by the fact that when you go to the Perfect for PlayStation 5 website, you see none of the latest TVs listed as compatible. The page hasn’t been updated since 2022. That about sums up Sony’s interest at the moment.
Home Cinema Purist
I would go as far (and to be honest, it’s not very far) to say that the Sony TV division is indifferent to gaming. Its messaging about gaming has been low-key, and of all the Sony events I have attended in my time at Trusted Reviews, I think there’s been one that’s been focused on PlayStation, which was when it introduced its gaming headsets and monitors – and that had nothing to do with TVs.
It has never sought certification for AMD FreeSync or Nvidia G-Sync, despite Sony PlayStation dabbling with PC publishing for a few years. Although it is compatible with both through its support of VRR, it can’t take advantage of any further optimisation or features. You’re stuck with the basic HDMI VRR implementation and nothing more.
Furthermore, while other TV brands have been emphasising that their 42- and 48-inch OLEDs would be perfect as an alternative gaming screen, Sony has been quiet to the point of being reluctant to preach this about its own models.
In fact, Sony has only ever launched one 42-inch OLED and one 48-inch OLED, and both went on sale in 2022. There have been no new models of this size since. This is technology that’s about five years old.
Sony, LG and even Panasonic have launched multiple small OLEDs since, all with a greater and wider number of gaming features that cover PC and console. The input lag on their models has always been quicker than on Sony TVs. And though the A90K is still available four years on, the price is similar to what you’d pay for a 2026 model from another brand.
Why would I buy Sony in this context?
What drove this op-ed in the first place was the introduction of a new feature in the interface of the new Bravia RGB TVs in the My Cinema feature that optimises “picture and sound for film first viewing” – but it only does this for film viewing or TV. There’s no option to adjust the picture or even the sound features for gaming.
This seems bizarre, but Sony Bravia has always been a home cinema brand and isn’t going for this Jambalaya of different things to appeal to all types of people. Attending its home cinema event at Sony HQ in Weybridge and there were people from Sony Pictures Entertainment to amplify the message about its new TVs. I don’t think that would have happened on the PlayStation side.
It is still a missed opportunity (a massive one, I’d say), but Sony Bravia’s priorities lie in other areas, and it won’t sacrifice performance for gaming. I would have thought that making the PS5 a strong aspect of your TV brand’s appeal would have contributed to more sales – there are probably more LG OLEDs partnered with PS5s than there are Sony Bravias in this world, which, if true, boggles the mind.
I don’t see the course being corrected anytime soon. Imagine if Sony fully utilised the potential of its gaming side. That would be a powerful partnership indeed.
