It seems that there was something that was completely glossed over during the PS4 Pro announcement yesterday. Certainly it’s capable of displaying 4K content, with the massive amount of processing power that it has with Polaris alone. But it seems that Sony forgot to mention that it was unable, somehow, to actually play Bluray discs with 4K content on them.
PS4 Pro missing 4K Blueray and other critical features already
Why the capability is missing is quite the mystery. The PS4 Pro has the hardware chops to decode the more dense 4K Bluray discs, but it seems that Sony has failed to take advantage of the codecs available to the new Polaris GPU to do just that. Instead, 4K content can come only from streaming sources, such as an upcoming Netflix update that enables the higher resolution content. So why leave out a very useful feature?
It seems that the wayward features could theoretically be added in an upcoming update, though it’s curious why it wouldn’t be enabled at release. Having your game system double as a media center, specifically as a disc player, is a common second use for them, something that’s quite appreciated despite not always being the very best at it. Regardless, it’s something not included that makes it a strange buy as anything other than a limited computing platform to play games. 4K Bluray content is the future, so why not let us enjoy it if we have it? If they added keyboard and mouse support then it could be a nice alternative to a PC for the time being.