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For decades, consoles have had 1 significant reward over PCs: simplicity. While this has changed somewhat in recent years, cheers to increased console complication and capabilities undreamed of in the days of the NES, consoles have still been marketed and sold as an easy way to get into gaming compared with PCs. Sony's PlayStation 4 Pro is going to change that, and non necessarily in a good way.

Ever since rumors leaked of a mid-bicycle PlayStation four upgrade, there have been questions most what grade the update would accept and what it would offering to gamers who already owned a conventional PS4. We now have some answers to these questions, but they don't paint a simple picture of the new hardware or its capabilities.

Accept HDR (High Dynamic Range) as one example. Sony is unlocking that adequacy in all PlayStation 4'due south via a firmware update, simply you won't meet the improvement on any PS4 unless you own a Tv set that's HDR-capable. (Sony supports the HDR-10 standard rather than the competing Dolby Vision or Technicolor HDR standards, and apparently has no plans to implement either of the latter.) If you don't have an HDR-enabled display to start with, the all-time anyone can give y'all is an approximation, like the one below. There's no way to really compare SDR versus HDR footage to encounter if you think HDR is worth ownership into without actually seeing information technology in person.

According to Eurogamer, having an HDR-capable display was critical to showcasing Sony's new hardware in the best light:

On the top-end screens used at the event at least, HDR was hugely important to the quality of the presentation. The bottom line is simple – in some scenarios, HDR adds just as much extra detail every bit the additional resolution. In Horizon Zero Dawn, the skybox is transformed, on Uncharted iv, the beach on the island level nosotros saw is washed out, completely lacking in texture until HDR is enabled. What's clear is that the perception of HDR having an affect on colour vibrancy is only half of the motion-picture show. Yes, contrast is massively improved, but in plow, this allows for much more item to exist resolved in the presentation.

The PlayStation 4 Pro gives developers more hardware to play with, simply it too gives them some significant liberty in how they deliver information technology. Crystal Dynamics will give players iii options for Rise of the Tomb Raider, Ars reports: A 4K30 FPS mode with HDR enabled that balances quality settings and frame rate, a 1080p30 way with a locked frame rate and maximum eye processed, and a 1080p way with an unlocked frame rate that's expected to evangelize 40-sixty FPS. A PC gamer examining these options will probably complain about being limited to 3. Console owners can't typically control such settings at all, just the bigger concern is with how these options are presented and communicating their meanings to PS4 Pro owners.

This is where we think Sony's messaging roughshod curt yesterday. Prior to the event, at that place was a corking deal of speculation on what kind of benefits existing 1080p TV owners could expect from the new console. Sony opted to focus well-nigh of its presentation and game demos on 4K and HDR, which makes sense for showcasing the maximum fidelity of the platform, but doesn't tell current owners annihilation about what they can await. While 4K adoption is expected to increase rapidly over the next few years, NPD predicts merely 10% market place penetration by the end of this year. Focusing on 4K and HDR with the PS4 Pro may have been a way to signal that Sony is thinking almost the future, but information technology left a lot of people wondering if they have to supplant their televisions to go any real benefit from the new console.

Haven't we done this earlier?

One could argue that we've already seen the marketplace handle this kind of transition earlier, when HDTVs, the Xbox 360, and the PS3 collectively came to marketplace, though bug with the PS3's hardware scaling caused early on adopters some headaches in that case, too. I think it's entirely possible that the narrow focus on HDR and 4K yesterday gave the wrong impression, and we may meet plenty of titles patching in new support for 1080p and boosted graphics item that meaningfully improves both operation and image quality for conventional Telly owners.

Sony has to navigate a tricky state of affairs hither. There'south nothing wrong with creating a console that shines in 4K (for more details on how the PS4 Pro achieves 4K, see our post on the topic) and in HDR. If consumers don't see a meaningful benefit on the TVs they own now, however, they'll be inclined to filibuster or defer the purchase until they're set up to upgrade their televisions. That could hit uptake on the platform and ultimately doom the experiment.

Information technology's non a foregone determination, though. Sony should've included UHD Blu-ray on the PS4 Pro (or at least offered a SKU that had it), only because it would've given the company a make clean sweep of upward-and-coming features. Sony claims to take dumped UHD considering its own research suggested it wasn't a compelling feature for PS4 owners — and that's a fleck troubling, given that Sony was instrumental in development of the standard. We'll have to wait and see if not having UHD Blu-ray, specifically, crops up equally a major reason people buy the Xbox I S every bit opposed to the PlayStation 4 Pro.