It’s a given in today’s console market of high-production titles and powerful systems that we would want the best settings enabled on our systems right away, but there’s a TV setting that may have been holding your PS5 gaming experience back on default.
Even if you’ve had your PlayStation 5 for a number of years, you might not have even realised it since it’s incredibly easy to get accustomed to things with time. That seems to be the case of the below Redditer who posted a thread detailing on how they realised the PS5’s ‘Deep Color’ setting was stopping their TV from displaying 4K HDR, even though it should have been more than capable of doing so.
At the start of the above thread, Dipstickpattywack said: “Today I was looking at video settings and noticed I couldn’t have 2160p with HDR on because ‘my device didn’t support it’ even though my TV and HDMI cable do support 4K HDR.
Turns out my TV’s HDMI settings had the ‘deep color’ option disabled by default. I enabled the option and the difference is night and day”.
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“Anyway, if you haven’t ever checked your video settings and have a big fancy 4k TV, you may wanna check your TV and PS5 settings to make sure you aren’t limiting your settings somehow.
I was fooled because it was capable of 1080p HDR with the default settings, which triggered my TV to show the HDR indicator as being on, so I just figured it was displaying 4k HD”, they added.
There were plenty of fellow Redditers who’ve realized they may have had the same issue and wanted to test it for themselves. One replied: “Ok now I'm worried I've been doing the same with my LG TV. ‘Deep color’ setting you say? I'll check it”.
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Another user, michaelfortu, was apparently totally taken with by surprised when they tested the setting and reported: “Holy c**p, it’s like I overclocked my TV wtf. Thanks, bro!”.
Depending on your TV and HDMI cable used with the PS5, the particular “HDMI Enhanced/Deep Color” setting seems to alter your TV’s resolution in its aim to increase color depth and accuracy to create higher fidelity.
Like with Dipstickpattywack, TVs are still capable of running HDR at a 1080p resolution — even if doing so at 4K is by far the most common. If you’ve been using your PS5 on the same TV set for a number of years but feel like your display has been short on 4K, search for how to alter the “HDMI Enhanced/Deep Color” setting on your brand of TV and give it a try.