PS5 4K Blu-Ray Player Review: Good Enough (2024)

As with the 4K Blu-ray player built into the Xbox Series X, the one built into the disc drive-carrying version of the PS5 is not and was never intended to be its star attraction. Sony’s latest console is, of course, first and foremost a gaming machine. The support in the disc-carrying version of the PS5 for the latest and greatest video disc format is just a welcome home cinema bonus.

That said, Sony’s decision to include a 4K Blu-ray player in the PS5 potentially has far reaching consequences for the home entertainment landscape.

With most manufacturers having now left the standalone 4K Blu-ray player market, and even those that remain showing little interest in refreshing their ranges, fans (like myself) of physical media relish the prospect of the PS5 and Xbox Series X leading to 4K Blu-ray players being installed in tens of millions more homes than they were before. After all, even if only a small percentage of those new console owners stumble upon 4K Blu-ray’s charms, it should lead to far more robust sales of 4K Blu-ray movie discs and, therefore, a much more certain long-term future for a physical media industry ravaged by the convenience of video streaming.

Sony’s decision to include a 4K Blu-ray player in the disc edition of the PS5 is made all the more welcome by the fact that the brand famously failed to include one in the PS4. Not even the PS4 Pro. Even though the Xbox One S and X both carried one.

While I had my own theories about why the PS4 went this way, at the time Sony itself lamely tried to excuse its PS4 omission by saying that it believed that streaming was the future of home video. Yet here we are with the 4K Blu-ray-toting PS5 today.

Mixed omens

So what might we hope for from a 4K Blu-ray player that’s built into a powerhouse Sony games console? The omens are mixed.

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On the upside, while Sony’s standalone 4K Blu-ray players are a bit awkward to use in some respects, their performance is outstanding for their various price points.

On the downside, none of the 4K Blu-ray players built into the Xbox One S and X or Series X are particularly great examples of their kind, in terms of either functionality or performance.

There’s also no hiding from the fact that the PS5 doesn’t support either the Dolby Vision or HDR10+ premium HDR formats. Discs that support either or both of these formats offer extra scene by scene HDR image data that compatible players and TVs can use to produce better, more dynamic images. Not supporting either format leaves users with just the baseline HDR10 system, which doesn’t provide scene by scene image data and so requires TVs to try and make the best of the more limited data on offer.

Sony has never supported HDR10+ with any of its TVs or standalone 4K Blu-ray players, so I guess it would have been optimistic to expect this format to turn up on the PS5. Sony’s previous two generations of standalone 4K Blu-ray player have, though, supported Dolby Vision. Albeit in a rather clumsy way (see this review of the Sony X1100ES for more details). So it would have been nice to see Dolby Vision turn up on the PS5’s 4K Blu-ray player too.

Late addition?

It’s possible that this situation could change. Dolby Vision is no longer dependent on up-front hardware integration, so it could potentially be added to the PS5 by a firmware update. In fact, this is exactly what happened with the Xbox One S and X (though the DV support on those consoles only supported streaming services, not games or 4K Blu-ray playback). I can’t help but think, though, that if Dolby Vision was indeed coming to the PS5 any time soon, Sony would have said so by now.

The PS5’s 4K Blu-ray player is fairly short on other features, too. There’s no option, for instance, to tell the player what sort of display the console is connected to, so that the player might tweak its output accordingly. Nor is there any facility to adjust the audio sync - something that might have been much appreciated by anyone running the console’s audio through a TV with ARC/eARC technology, as this set up can commonly cause lip synchronisation errors with some TVs and soundbars.

The lack of an audio sync adjustment is particularly unfortunate on the PS5 given that, as reported in this earlier article, some users of the console are finding that due to what looks like a hopefully fixable settings bug/limitation, they can’t currently pass 4K and HDR simultaneously from the console through their soundbars. Which leaves the potentially laggy ARC/eARC route as the only way they can enjoy both 4K HDR and surround sound from their PS5s.

There’s no option either for, say, stripping HDR out of a 4K HDR image - something that can be useful with low-brightness projectors. This option was probably always unlikely to end up on a 4K Blu-ray player built into a console, though.

Object sound

It briefly seemed, too, as if the PS5’s 4K Blu-ray player didn’t support playback of the Dolby Atmos or DTS:X ‘object-based’ sound formats. Certainly I couldn’t get either format to trigger on my audio system even after I’d selected a bitstream output (rather than the default Linear PCM option) in the console’s main Audio Output menu.

I eventually discovered that there’s a separate bitstream output option for the PS5’s 4K Blu-ray player app (as people who use PS4 consoles as their Blu-ray players could actually have reminded me, since the PS5 approach is the same). To access this you need to press the PS5’s Options button (the small white one to the top right of the touch pad), then scroll along to the ‘three dots’ more options icon on screen, then choose settings, and finally in the Audio Format section choose Bitstream instead of the default Linear PCM. So that’s easy, then!

As an extra complication here, there are separate options in the console’s (rather than the 4K Blu-ray app’s) Audio Format Priority selection screen for Bitstream (Dolby) and Bitstream (DTS) - even though the console doesn’t currently appear to support either Dolby Atmos or DTS:X from any game or streaming app.

Even if the PS5 DID support either of these audio formats from games or streaming apps, it seems odd that there are separate Dolby Atmos/DTS:X priority options to choose from rather than there just being a single Bitstream out option.

Maybe this situation will become clearer at some point when/if object based sound becomes more of a thing in the PS5’s gaming or, more likely, streaming app ecosystem.

Anyway, the bottom line is that once you’ve figured out how to do it, the 4K Blu-ray player can, mercifully, play back Dolby Atmos and DTS:X audio into your sound system.

Choose your mode

There is, though, one final set up niggle to report. Namely that since the PS5 doesn’t (currently) support automatic low latency mode switching, you need to remember to manually switch your TVs from their Game modes to Standard or Cinema when watching a 4K Blu-ray on your console. Depending on your TV, failing to do this can have pretty unpleasant 4K Blu-ray picture quality side effects, such as reduced backlighting performance and flatter colours.

The options menus for the Blu-ray player app does, slightly surprisingly, offer a couple of noise reduction setting options. While these work decently well with grainy looking HD sources, though - arguably better than the NR systems you get in some mid to entry level TVs - they don’t do anything very obvious for 4K playback. Other than perhaps making the picture look processed from time to time.

One last feature of the PS5’s disc drive to consider is how many disc formats it plays. Or rather, how many it doesn’t play. For while 4K Blu-rays, HD Blu-rays and DVDs are on the menu, there’s no support for either 3D Blu-rays or even CDs.

Sony has form here. The PS4 doesn’t support CDs either (in fact, Sony even stated that trying to play CDs in a PS4 could ‘damage your system’), and 3D support was only added via firmware update after the PS4’s launch.

I guess the same belated 3D support might happen with the PS5 - maybe in line with a potential future update to the PlayStation’s Virtual Reality hardware. It somehow doesn’t feel likely this time round, though, given the dwindling number of 3D-capable displays and new 3D Blu-rays coming to market.

3D who?

The PlayStation Blog is perhaps notably to the point on the subject of 3D, too. In answer to the question “Does PS5 Support 3D Blu-ray Movies?”, the answer is a succinct “No, 3D stereoscopic output is not supported on PS5”. There’s no ‘for now’ at the end, or any other hint that Sony is considering introducing it later.

Having established that the PS5 is no rival for a good standalone 4K Blu-ray player in feature terms, can it at least make a case for itself on a performance level? Actually, yes.

First impressions of the PS5 4K Blu-ray player in solo action, free of comparisons with other players, reveal a picture that strikes me on an LG CX OLED TV test screen as detailed, clean, dynamic and colorful. A substantial upgrade over the experience you get with HD Blu-rays. Even without Dolby Vision or (on Samsung TVs) HDR10+ on hand to give 4K Blu-rays’ HDR images that extra lift.

Black levels look deep and consistent. Detail levels look properly 4K without artificial enhancement. Baseline and highlight brightness levels look suitably ‘HDR’. Video noise seems contained. Colors look expressive, rich and pure, enjoying that extra vibrancy and potency you’d hope to see from the wide colour gamuts found with almost all HDR discs.

So far, so good. So let’s try and immediately puncture the warm fuzzy feelings by throwing the PS5 up against the 4K Blu-ray beast that is the Oppo 205.

Dolby Vision is sorely missed

One thing this comparison exposed right away was just what a shame it is that Sony hasn’t equipped the PS5 with Dolby Vision. Focusing for the sake of consistency on the 4K Blu-ray of It I used for most comparisons during my review of the Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray player, the extra picture information supplied to the LG CX TV by the Dolby Vision master accessible by the Oppo 205 consistently delivers a much more controlled, balanced, and natural-looking image.

For instance, as Eddie walks down the road towards a blazing sun just before his first run in with his ‘infected nightmare’, on the Oppo the sun behind Eddie looks controlled rather than flared out, and the area around it contains noticeable subtle color detail that’s lost in the more bleached look you get with the PS5’s actually brighter but less controlled image. There’s also noticeably more color noise in the sun-lit front of the wooden building to Eddie’s left on the PS5 too - in part because the console’s heavier but less controlled saturations draw more attention to such imperfections.

Another startling difference between the PS5 HDR10 and Oppo Dolby Vision color performance can be seen on the back of Eddie’s left leg. On the PS5 this looks painfully sunburned; on the Oppo it looks like a much more natural skin tone.

In short, even a single frame like this It one is enough to clearly reveal the benefits you get from both Dolby Vision’s enhanced color mastering and the extra data available to help a TV optimise the way it presents such an intense image.

Focusing on smaller details, where the Dolby Vision difference isn’t so much of a factor, the black power/phone lines running across the image at 48:29 in this It sequence look cleaner and more refined on the Oppo. They look ‘bittier’ and even slightly thicker on the PS5.

Premium differences

The PS5’s image with this 48:29 still frame also looks a touch noisier than the Oppo’s too, particularly around the edges of the wires. Plus there’s a touch less definition and sharpness in the image’s background trees, especially those to the right of Eddie’s hip. This appears to be partly due to the extra Dolby Vision color precision bringing out more subtle green shading, but there is also a blurrier look to the tops of the trees on the PS5 that’s more straightforwardly detail related.

It’s important to stress at this point that actually the PS5’s pictures in this It sequence look brighter and bolder using the LG TV’s Standard picture preset than they do in Dolby Vision from the Oppo. So you certainly can’t accuse the PS5’s images of lacking HDR impact. But the Oppo’s pictures look more natural and controlled, getting more out of the ‘range’ part of HDR, whereas the PS5 brightness leads to an actually overall flatter, less natural, slightly excessive look.

The LG TV’s Movie picture preset delivers a calmer take on the PS5’s picture, but the relative lack of precision and balance remains.

While it’s useful to highlight, though, what the PS5 gives up in picture quality potential terms by not supporting Dolby Vision like many standalone 4K Blu-ray players (including Sony’s) do, a fairer comparison of what the PS5 can do with the HDR10 format it DOES support is provided by Mad Max: Fury Road. This 4K Blu-ray only carries an HDR10 master, so the Oppo can’t leverage its Dolby Vision advantage.

Not surprisingly, the results of this head to head are markedly closer. In fact, the PS5 gives a pretty decent account of itself considering how much cheaper it is, and that its 4K Blu-ray player is part of a wider entertainment eco system rather than just being a video disc spinner.

The PS5’s Mad Max pictures aren’t quite as sharp as the Oppo’s; if you freeze the film at exactly seven minutes in, as Immortan Joe is fitted with his transparent armor, the Oppo reveals slightly more detail and clarity in the light reflections and, especially, the medals and badges.

Beauty in the detail

Color looks slightly more rich, refined and controlled, too, in areas such as the red ribbon attached to Joe’s ‘500’ badge, and there’s slightly less noise in particularly detailed areas such as the circuit board adornment. Another helpful shot for illustrating the differences occurs at 08:32, as Immortan Joe looks down on a crowd below. The Oppo clearly brings out more definition here; you feel like you’re seeing more actual people, rather than just a blurry mass of vaguely human forms. And this seems as much down to the Oppo’s better color management as enhanced sharpness or detail reproduction.

This collection of strengths all help the Oppo’s picture look a touch more three-dimensional, too. In fact, it’s this three dimensionality that stands as the biggest difference between the two players’HDR10 images when you’re letting a 4K disc play, rather than staring at a frozen frame.

At which point it’s important to recall that when you were able to buy one, the Oppo 205 would have cost you £1,300. And in the context of that sort of price gap, while the PS5’s pictures are clearly bettered by the Oppo, they are by no means disgraced. Particularly when it comes to black level and brightness performance, and levels of detail in ultra-bright picture areas such as the sun reflector at 08:21.

For a fairer HDR10 comparison, I next ran the PS5 against the Panasonic UB820 standalone 4K Blu-ray player. This is a mid-range deck available for around $500 in the US (and a bargain £300 in the UK). It supports both the Dolby Vision and HDR10+ premium HDR formats - though unlike the Oppo, it lets you turn this support off if you want to stick with the vanilla HDR10 master that underlies all HDR10+ and Dolby Vision masters. I took advantage of this option right away, so that I could do a straight HDR10 PS5 comparison with the same It sequences I’ve tried to stick with for all my PS5 and Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray tests.

Returning to the reference shot of Eddie walking into the sun ahead of his first Pennywise encounter, it’s pretty hard to tell the PS5 and UB820 pictures apart. After a LOT of long, hard staring, though, the Panasonic reveals just a little more definition and color neutrality in the fascia and side of the house on the left, and a little more definition around the edges of the vapor trails. There’s a little less noise in the shaded side of the house too, and around the power lines that appear to top right.

PS5 vs Panasonic

The trees in this shot look more or less the same on the PS5 and UB820 in terms of both sharpness, detail and color tone refinement. In fact, color generally, from Eddie’s ‘sunburned’ leg to the rendering of the trees and the bright blue skies is pretty much the same across both players.

At 1:09:00, as we join the Losers Club at the carnival ground, there is a fractionally more pronounced difference between the players. In particular, the wire that runs across the sky to the left of the statue of Paul Bunyan looks noisier and more broken on the PS5. The red ‘ice cream’ writing on the van in the background is a touch cleaner and more pronounced on the Panasonic player too, and the colors of the balloons and flags look marginally more refined on the standalone deck, contributing to a marginally more pronounced 3D feel to the image.

Even in this shot, though, spotting the differences I’ve described was tricky enough to leave the PS5 deservedly able to feel pretty happy with itself.

I also used the UB820/PS5 comparisons using It to properly home in on the the PS5’s black level performance. And I’m happy to say that it doesn’t suffer with the elevated black levels and instability issues on the LG CX OLED that the Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray drive still does. With the extremely challenging-to-show sequence in Georgie’s cellar in It’s opening scene, aside from a strange momentary brightness pulse in the black bars above and below the picture as the scene cuts to the first shot inside the cellar, brightness and black levels remained as deep and rock solid on the PS5 as they did on the Panasonic UB820.

PS5 vs budget Panasonic

For one final stand-alone 4K Blu-ray comparison (I’ll be doing a separate article comparing the PS5 4K BD drive with the Xbox Series X soon), I put the PS5 up against a very affordable Panasonic UB450 (£179 in the UK).

In this HDR10 ‘shoot out’, the PS5 matched its rival at pretty much every turn. Try as I might, aside from the momentary black bar flash on the PS5 during the Georgie cellar sequence in It, I couldn’t see any really significant picture strengths in the standalone deck’s favour. Black levels look equally dark and consistent, detail levels and sharpness also appear pretty much identical, and colors are indistinguishable in terms of their saturation levels and balance.

Peak brightness and clipping levels on the LG CX TV appeared the same from both decks, too. In fact, the only marked performance difference went in the PS5’s favor, as it handled video noise in dark scenes a touch better than the UB450.

The UB450 does have one big trick up its sleeve, though: Like the more expensive UB820, it supports both the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision active HDR systems. I turned this support off for the above head to head comparisons, but as we’ve seen already, the HDR10+ and Dolby Vision formats can deliver picture quality advantages where both content and your display device support them.

Upscaling

While I’ve deliberately focussed on the ability of the PS5 to play 4K Blu-ray discs, it’s worth quickly referencing its performance with lower resolution discs too. Especially since if you have the console set to output 4K (which happens by default if you have a 4K TV), it upscales HD Blu-rays to 4K.

The HD Blu-ray of the final Harry Potter movie has long been a favourite of mine when it comes to checking out a screen or source’s upscaling. Its tricky color palette, stark contrast and awkward mix of detail and sometimes quite heavy amounts of filmic grain make it a real 4K upscaling challenge. So it’s good to find the PS5 handling it decently well.

A decent amount of detail is added, for starters, without causing the picture to look harsh. Neither noise nor natural grain in the HD source are excessively exaggerated by the upscaling process either, and colors retain more or less the same tones; there’s no big color shift.

There are a few limitations of the upscaling too, though. Some skin tones can look a touch plasticky/detail-lite versus the results you can get with, say, the X1 upscaling chip provided in Sony’s 4K TVs. Sony and Panasonic standalone 4K Blu-ray players can look a little cleaner with the same disc, too, when using their own 4K upscaling - especially on skin tones or very bright areas. There’s also some mild ringing around high contrast details on the PS5 that you don’t get with the very best TV or standalone 4K Blu-ray player upscalers.

While the PS5 may not be an exemplary upscaler of HD Blu-rays, though, crucially I’d say that it’s good enough to save you the trouble of having to keep turning the console’s 4K playback off when playing HD discs (so that your 4K TV’s upscaler can take over). This means that the PS5 can deliver the sort of seamless and polished user experience that’s likely to be critical to its 4K Blu-ray drive’s potential adoption by consumers who bought the console first and foremost for gaming.

In the same vein, I haven’t experienced any crashes from the PS5’s Blu-ray section so far. All 40-plus 4K Blu-ray discs I’ve played in it have booted and played flawlessly. Shuttling around a title using fast forward/rewind or chapter skipping causes neither frame rate nor audio glitches, and there appear to be no system stability issues associated with repeatedly switching between disc playback and the console’s main menu. You can even switch to a game and then back to a film with no apparent problems.

The PS5 does run a touch noisier than any of the stand-along decks I tested it against (once the Panasonic UB450 has settled down after some initial rather ugly grating noises whenever you first insert a disc, anyway). Aside from the occasional strange but short-lived slight buzz that appears on top of the basic disc ‘whir’, though, I wouldn’t imagine anything about the PS5’s 4K Blu-ray playback noise proving a significant distraction during anything other than a silent movie.

This is probably a good point to quickly mention the PS5’s Blu-ray/4K Blu-ray audio performance. Basically, it’s absolutely fine. Movie soundtracks - especially Dolby Atmos and DTS:X ones - sound as clean, detailed and potent as you’d expect, and as noted in passing earlier, I didn’t experience any glitches or distortions, even after switching between different parts of the console’s OS.

Verdict

The PS5 is certainly not a perfect 4K Blu-ray player. Its quirky audio set up will catch novice users out, its inability to play 3D Blu-rays or audio CDs feels a bit miserly and its refusal to join Sony’s standalone 4K Blu-ray decks in supporting the Dolby Vision HDR format instantly denies it a route to better picture quality for people with Dolby Vision-compatible TVs.

Having said all that, its performance with regulation HDR10 4K Blu-ray masters is at least on a par with respectable entry level stand-alone 4K Blu-ray players, and only marginally short of a well-regarded mid-range deck. It also runs stably and pretty slickly once you’ve got it set up right.

So while it might not be the new 4K Blu-ray player star some Sony fans had optimistically been hoping for, it’s good enough to potentially open the eyes of potentially millions of new PS5 owners to what 4K Blu-ray is capable of. Which is probably about as much as the more realistic members of the 4K Blu-ray fan club could reasonably have hoped for.

Related reading

PS5 Not Playing 4K HDR Properly? Here Are 7 Things To Try

Sony PS5 Reportedly Suffering With Frustrating 4K HDR Bug

Xbox Series X 4K Blu-ray Player Review: A Work In Progress. Hopefully

Sony UBP-X1100ES 4K Blu-ray Player Review: Dicing With Dolby

PS5 4K Blu-Ray Player Review: Good Enough (2024)
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