How to get your Sony PS5 to talk 4K HDR RGB 120Hz on the BRAVIA X900H

Many of you will be extremely frustrated that Sony just can’t get their shit together. First, they release the X900H, supposedly the flagship panel for their new PS5 and it shipped without 120Hz or HDMI 2.1. Still to this day, the manual makes no mention of HDMI 2.1 or it’s supported formats.

If you, like me, fired up your X900H and PS5 and wondered why the colours looked shit and decided to do more digging you’d be met with multiple issues. Firstly the issue where the PS5 refuses to display HDR in 4K instead presenting errors such as “4K HDR is not supported” or see that 120Hz is missing from the available frequencies in the Video Output information.

Firstly to check what your playstation and panel are doing you can view the HDMI Output info on the playstation in the following menu:

Settings > Screen and Video > Video Output > Video Output Information

What you are looking for here is to see 4K resolution (3840×2160), RGB (NOT YUV420 or YUV422) and see 120 Hz as a supported HDR frequency. If the TV is misconfigured you will see an error “When displaying 4K HDR content at 60Hz, the colour format will be YUV422 or YUV3V420 instead of RGB due to the HDMI 2.0 transfer speed limitations” – that’s not good as there’s no point buying this TV if you can’t use it to its full potential. That said if you are playing FPS at 120Hz the PS5 doesn’t appear to support RGB colour format only YUV422 – at 60 Hz you get the full colour (plus Raytracing which is disabled at 120 Hz).

The solution to getting this to work is as follows

On the Sony Bravia X900H we need to change the settings to enable HDMI 2.1 on the HDMI port:

On the remote press the settings (cog) button > Settings > Watching TV (Yes I know, WTF is it doing in this menu and not the external inputs menu!) > External Inputs > HDMI signal format

From here you need to select the port that your PS5 is connected to and change it to Enhanced format NOT Enhanced format (Dolby Vision) which is what the stupid thing seems to default to whenever you plug in a PS5 (you’d think a Sony device would be able to detect a Sony device correctly right?).

Now if you go back out to your PS5 it will likely have prompted you to setup the HDR again. Go through that and back to the Video Output Information screen and verify that you are seeing:

Resolution: 3840 x 2160 – 60 Hz (menu screen doesn’t output 120 Hz)
Colour format: RGB (HDR)
HDCP: 2.3
HDR: Supported
Frequencies (HDR): 24 Hz, 25 Hz, 30 Hz, 50 Hz, 60 Hz, 120 Hz (YUV422)

The other thing to check is your HDMI cable. Really cheap cables likely wont work well. Ideally grab a certified HDMI ULTRA High Speed.