Blu-ray is fading after 20 years in the market, with Sony Japan finally discontinuing its last dedicated Blu-ray player. According to FlatpanelsHD, Sony Japan has finally marked the UBP-X700/K player as “Discontinued,” meaning customers in the country can no longer purchase a new standalone Blu-ray player from the company. This should not come as a surprise, as Sony stopped shipping the players in February of this year, suggesting that Sony only relied on existing inventory for its remaining Blu-ray player sales.

The PlayStation 5 is the only remaining Sony device that can play Blu-ray discs, but the company has also announced that it will end physical game disc production by January 2028. Because of this, some people fear that the upcoming PlayStation 6 will no longer have an optical drive. This move follows in the footsteps of LG, which ended Blu-ray player production in 2024. Japanese electronics companies Elecom and Buffalo have also ended production of Blu-ray drives for PCs this year, although Buffalo Americas says that it is “fully committed to supplying optical drives to the American market, and our DVD/Blu-ray drive products are anticipated to remain available for the near future.”

This move away from physical media and focus on streaming is worrying, especially to those who are concerned that we are moving towards a world where people no longer own anything. Because of this, sales of “retro media,” including CDs and vinyl, went up by 59% and 18% respectively. While you could still purchase a Blu-ray player from other manufacturers like Panasonic, Sony is one of the bigger companies that built and supported the standard, and its move to end the production and sale of Blu-ray players will leave this niche market even smaller. The audiophile market is facing the same dilemma, as some Hi-Fi player manufacturers ended production of selected products because optical drive makers have stopped making the components needed to read SACDs.

Ultra HD Blu-ray is facing the same upheaval that VHS and DVDs went through with the introduction of new formats. But while the older technologies were replaced by higher-quality formats, Blu-ray is being replaced not by more pixels, but by the convenience of streaming. However, it also comes with the caveat that people would no longer own physical media; a trend that worries data archivists.

Rep. Ritchie Torres of New York's 15th congressional district has introduced the Power To The Players Act. This new legislation aims to protect consumers by directing the FTC to establish regulations on game ownership to curb anti-consumer business practices. "Under the bill, buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," the release says. "Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down."

Games having an expiration date despite being more expensive than ever has been scrutinized by players all over the world, along with aggressive monetization schemes within the games themselves. Rep. Ritchie Torres isn’t the first to fight for gamers, as Pennsylvania state senator John Kane also recently introduced the Protect Our Games Act, requiring publishers to provide an offline mode, community servers, or a 25% minimum refund. Players want to be able to enjoy their games even if the publisher decides to stop supporting the game, but Sony doesn’t think the players own their games and that they have the right to pull the rug from under them. Sony’s lawyers even recently said in a defense in an ongoing class action lawsuit that clicking on the “purchase” button would obviously not lead the consumer to think that they were acquiring a durable right to use the game instead of a revocable license; basically a one-time rent fee that Sony could take away at any moment that benefits them.

One of the most prominent recent examples of players not owning their games came in 2024 with The Crew, an online-only racing game that Ubisoft shut down for server upkeep, making it unplayable even for those who had recently purchased it. Ubisoft had not provided a way for community servers to be set up, nor an offline mode, since even the single-player campaign depended on a connection to Ubisoft’s servers. Another is the notorious yearly sports games released by EA, 2K, and Sony, with NBA 2K25 specifically being cited by Rep. Torres in his announcement of the Power to the Players Act; NBA 2K25 is being pulled from digital storefronts, with the online servers being shut down only two years after release, leaving players unable to use a main feature of the game they purchased, and new players unable to purchase the game at all. Overwatch 2’s release also killed the first Overwatch game, replacing it outright instead of the first game becoming a purchasable and separately playable game.

The Crew’s shutdown prompted the Stop Killing Games movement, demanding that publishers leave the games functional after discontinuation in the form of an offline mode, peer-to-peer patching, and the ability to host community servers. The movement also pushes back against the industry standard of selling games as revocable licenses rather than outright ownership of the copy. Concrete definitions and details of the bill have yet to be released, but it aims to require publishers to provide an offline mode before shutting down servers and actual consumer ownership instead of a license that can be taken away, potentially satisfying the demands of the movement. We don’t know whether the right to transfer that Rep. Torres mentions is mandatory for digital purchases, but it will likely be relevant for physical copies. It is also important for the bill to strictly define what ownership is and what rights the owners have over their copy.

One popular phrase against these practices is “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing,” pushing strongly against these revocable licenses that the companies want you to purchase. Piracy is often touted as a better experience by players, as it removes DRM that often slows games down and provides a permanent copy that the publishers cannot modify to be dysfunctional; many players say they would be more glad to purchase the game if it were actually a better experience. It is still yet to be known how well the bill will execute its aims, but this is a big step towards correcting the direction the gaming industry is currently on.

Overdrive, a homebrew games library offering over 1,600 PS4 and PS5 games, went viral after a video of its demonstration on X by Edigax caught online attention. Shortly after the influx of attention the Overdrive project received, it was shut down, reportedly after the developer received a cease-and-desist letter in an X post by Oliver Darko. However, two GitHub repositories have taken its place, reviving the project after one day of downtime.

The storefront for jailbroken PS5 models was released on GitHub on October 9, with reception being relatively tame. It was only after Edigax, a popular jailbreak installation tutorial account, posted their video on X for Overdrive’s installation on October 12 that it went viral, receiving over 7.9 million views with over 600 comments, many commenting on how Sony deserves this over their controversial effort to produce no physical copies of games: “Only digital, as Sony wanted,” one commenter says.

A day after the project went viral, Sony reportedly sent the developer a cease-and-desist letter and had it shut down. There are no concrete sources for this cease-and-desist, but it likely doesn’t matter because just a day later, like a single-headed hydra getting its head cut, two more popped up in its place; one is a fork of the original, while the other is a clone of the original under a different account.

The jailbreak community seems keen to preserve this homebrew because of its incredible library and as a protest against Sony’s business practices, making it unlikely that Sony will ever get rid of this problem for good. If Sony manages to take down another, more will likely pop up in its place.

The PS5 jailbreaking community has been on a roll in the past few weeks since the Relapse jailbreak’s release on September 29. Since then, an influx of homebrew apps has been developed, including a range of emulators, launchers, and streaming apps; even Xbox Cloud Gaming runs natively on the PS5. It seems that this giant library of PS4 and PS5 games, easily accessible and completely free, is the climax of the past month’s notable releases that finally caught Sony's attention.

Popular Xbox emulator Xemu has just been ported to jailbroken Sony PlayStation 5 consoles. Reddit user u/Yzenxam posted a video of their PS5 running the emulator with three games installed: Forza Motorsport, Halo 2, and Crash Bandicoot. The port, playfully named XPSemu, is on their GitHub page: ZiZc3.

The modder has stated that XPSemu is Xemu and is nothing different; all they did was allow it to be opened on the PS5 as an application. Xemu uses QEMU’s TCG JIT to translate the Xbox CPU to the PS5 CPU in realtime, allowing for fast performance compared to interpretation-based translation.

Xemu has its own translation for the Xbox’ NV2A GPU and uses a Vulkan renderer to work with modern GPUs; thanks to the modder behind PS5_Vulkan, Xemu can talk to the PS5’s AMD GPU through the open-source RADV Vulkan driver — allowing the porter to run Xemu as a native PS5 application.

ZiZc3 also added their own touches as explained in their GitHub repository:

"On top of the port, XPSemu adds its own controller-friendly dashboard, per-game settings, cover art, play time, game patches, a performance overlay, a per-game log and a set of CPU optimizations made for the PS5's Zen 2 processor."

While QEMU's TCG JIT is relatively fast, it still leaves plenty to be desired. ZiZc3 explains that the emulated Xbox CPU is the bottleneck, loaded at 85-97% while the PS5 GPU remains mostly idle. As a consequence, the resolution multiplier up to 3-4x barely affects performance, and upscaling with FSR does not add performance.

The developer further explains that the PS5's Zen 2 cores are slower per core than a fast PC, and CPU-heavy games suffer from this. In terms of performance, ZiZc3 has provided a table of their experience and performance of the games on XPSemu:

As of writing, there are fewer than 15 fully PS5-exclusive games, while the number of emulators the PS5 can run is increasing by the week. On X, users BrinoTk and Mihawk9_9 (the same person behind PS5_Vulkan) announced their Xbox 360 and PS5 Proton projects on the same day, with the Xbox 360 emulator already available for testing.

The PS5 already has emulators for PS1-3, with PS4 emulation technically built in. Non-PlayStation emulators besides the XPSemu include the Nintendo Switch, Wii U, 3DS, and of course the myriad of emulators available on RetroArch as well. On the other side of the coin, the PS5 itself has also been emulated on PC and the Xbox Series X — at this point, the lines are blurring faster than owners know what to do with their jailbroken PS5.

The PlayStation 5 is getting AI-driven upscaling, giving base console owners access to the technology that was previously available on the more powerful PlayStation 5 Pro. In a blog post, Sony introduced Quick Spectral Super Resolution (QSSR), a new version of its AI upscaling technology for the PS5, with Marvel’s Wolverine and Ghost of Yōtei being the first games to support it.

Sony originally introduced PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR) as a highlight feature when it launched the PS5 Pro. The technology uses AI to analyze frames on a pixel-by-pixel basis and reconstruct them at a higher resolution. This helps improve image detail and temporal stability while allowing games to render internally at a lower resolution. However, the computational requirements of PSSR meant that the feature was not available on the standard PS5.

According to Sony, QSSR uses a streamlined neural-network architecture and a hand-tuned implementation intended to maximize performance on the PS5. The company describes it as a new performance tier of AI upscaling rather than a direct replacement for PSSR, which remains the “gold standard” solution on the PS5 Pro.

Sony does not intend to limit the new upscaling tech to its own studios, as the QSSR library will be offered to all PlayStation developers. This will allow more PS5 games to adopt the technology in the future and give developers an option for balancing rendering resolution, performance, and image quality on the aging console hardware.

Jasmin Patry, Lead Rendering Engineer at Sucker Punch Productions, said, “QSSR excels at resolving the fine details in our characters and environments and does so with a level of temporal stability that hasn’t been possible on the PS5 console until now. We’ve long wished that all PS5 players could experience the incredible image quality that PSSR brings to PS5 Pro, and QSSR is a positive step towards that goal!”

With Sony continuing to improve its upscaling technology in collaboration with AMD under Project Amethyst, PS5 owners can expect sharper and more stable visuals in supported games without having to upgrade their hardware. That said, QSSR won't turn the standard PS5 into a PS5 Pro; rather, it can be best described as an important software-level upgrade for the console.

Sony launched the world’s first CD player on this day in 1982, kickstarting the compact disc digital audio era. The Sony CDP-101 was released to consumers in Japan, priced at JPY 168,000. That converts to $1,060 at today’s exchange rate, and is about $3,700 adjusted for inflation. CD players were meant to be a worldwide launch on October 1, 1982, but tech partner Philips didn’t have its CD100 ready, so Sony agreed to limit this initial event launch to Japan. Six months later, U.S. and European consumers would get their chance to buy a CD player, starting March 1983.

As for this first CD player hardware release for consumers from Sony. It wasn’t perfect, of course, and Wikipedia points out one particular limitation of the CDP-101: It had just one DAC for both left and right audio channels due to the high cost of these converters. Without sample-and-hold circuitry, this meant the stereo channels were approximately 11 μs out of sync.

Before CDs, home hi-fi setups of the era were typically built around vinyl records and compact audio cassette tapes. For a full set of separates, an enthusiast would also add a radio tuner, an amplifier, plus speakers - of course. Users of these older established pre-recorded audio media would have to cope with music affected by various imperfections over time. Vinyl sound quality would be a battle to maintain against the challenges of dust, scratches, warping, and wear. I remember pre-recorded cassettes had other problems, the major one for me being the variable quality of the tapes used by the distributors.

So, CDs came with many attractive promises, most importantly in the context of the early 1980s – providing digital music data that was read by a laser and wouldn’t wear. CDs also offered near-instant track selection, skipping, and replay. But most consumers would have to wait a few years: firstly for the price of player hardware to approach an acceptable level, and secondly for CD albums to become the norm for new releases and classic remasters.

Sony worked with CBS to have 50 CD albums on the shelves when the CDP-101 debuted in Japan. You’d think that six months later, when Philips joined in, and we saw the worldwide launch, that the catalog would have grown. Surprisingly, the ‘western’ launch was backed by just 16 titles.

It wouldn’t be until the mid-1980s when landmark DDD releases arrived and player prices dipped to much more acceptable levels that CDs would become established as a hi-fi staple. At around the same time, we started to get computers with built-in CD-ROM drives, but these would only start to become common from the early to mid 1990s and the dawn of the multimedia PC era.

If you are a retro tech fan who would be interested in buying a Sony CDP-101 before they all end up in museums, we noticed that you can buy them on eBay. At the time of writing, there were several of these 1982-vintage CD players for between $600 and $800.

In the face of strong demand and device shortages, Sony has decided to filter PlayStation 5 Pro purchasers in Japan using a lottery system. We’ve seen such anti-scalper techniques used by the makers of the most treasured tech before, but the Sony Store in Japan is also insisting (machine translation) that those joining the queue for PS5 Pro purchase tickets possess a Japanese PSN account. Furthermore, participants must have logged at least 60 hours of gaming time on a PS4 or PS5 over the last two years.

The Sony Store’s PS5 Pro application and purchase conditions indicate that PS5 Pro purchase lottery ticket applications are limited to gamers who can satisfy the following:

• “For those using PlayStation Online Services with a Sony account registered in Japan.”
• “You must be signed in to your Sony account and have played a total of 60 hours or more of games on either a PS5 or PS4, or both, between September 27, 2024 (Friday) and September 27, 2026 (Sunday) at 23:59.”

These Sony Store PS5 Pro purchase applications will open on October 7, with sales to ticket holders commencing October 26, 2026. If the applications to purchase Sony’s MSRP stock outstrip supply, then prospective purchasers will be selected via lottery. Successful applicants will have until November 2 to complete the purchase of their PS5 Pro at MSRP.

The PS5 Pro has been available to buy for approaching two years (launched November 2024). These game consoles have also seen prices climb several times this year due to key components being funneled to AI data centers. You might think that the console aging and getting more expensive would slow demand. It is thought, however, that demand for the PS5/Pro consoles is now rising, at least partly due to the impending release of Rockstar’s GTA 6.

Japanese gamers have previously been seen to grumble about foreign tourists buying up stocks of RTX 5090s, for example. That experience makes the PS5 Pro lottery system, tied to the Japanese PSN account requirement, seem logical. Moreover, the logged PlayStation gaming time of 60 hours helps steer stock to folks who buy these machines to enjoy, rather than just scalp and sell them on.

When I look at my collection of computer monitor reviews from the past 13 years, I see a tremendous number of displays from manufacturers that begin with the letter A. But there are lesser-represented companies with the same level of engineering expertise and high quality as mainstream brands when it comes to the best gaming monitors.

If you’re old enough to remember CRTs, then you’ve heard of the Sony Trinitron tube. This was an evolved display with a cylindrical shape rather than the bubble screens that fronted other CRTs. It wasn’t completely flat, but it curved only along one axis. And it was coveted by users for its sharp and undistorted image.

Today, you can still buy a premium gaming monitor from Sony, and here is its latest: the INZONE M10S II. It’s a 27-inch OLED with QHD resolution and 540 Hz refresh rate. It runs at 720 Hz in HD and supports Adaptive-Sync, HDR, and wide-gamut color. Let’s take a look.

Sony INZONE M10S II Specs

The M10S II starts with an OLED panel that runs natively at 2560x1440 QHD resolution and 540 Hz. A dual-refresh mode bumps that up to 720 Hz at HD, 1280x720 pixels. Adaptive-Sync runs on both AMD and Nvidia platforms, and you get HDR support with the ability to calibrate for HDR10 content. The screen coating is unusual in that it’s matte, while nearly every OLED that crosses my desk is shiny. That finish is extremely effective at rejecting image-spoiling ambient light. It literally swallows up reflections and displays the image without any visible grain.

The M10S II delivers a huge color gamut that, in my tests, covered nearly 110% of DCI-P3. I found that calibration was necessary, but the reward was a beautifully saturated image. There’s an sRGB mode available if you need that smaller gamut for photography or graphics work. You also get variable brightness to stretch dynamic range. It has two settings that had a positive impact in both practice and testing. I’ll tell you more about that on page four. Peak output is around 475 nits in SDR mode and 543 nits in HDR mode when measuring a 25% window pattern.

For gaming, you get plenty of goodness in the form of static and dynamic aiming points, OLED anti-flicker, black frame insertion for blur reduction at low frame rates, an FPS indicator, and a set of timers. Missing are internal speakers and LED lighting, but you do get USB ports for peripherals. There’s panel protection in the form of advanced heat management and OLED care options, such as panel refresh and pixel orbiting. The latest I/O ports also include one DisplayPort 2.1 and two HDMI 2.1 ports. A pair of headphones can be plugged into the provided 3.5mm jack. There’s a comprehensive OSD for control, or you can use Sony’s INZONE Hub app, which is free to download.

The M10S II sells for $1,100 at this writing, so it’s primed to compete with other speedy competition displays. While it isn’t quite as loaded as an Asus ROG Swift screen, it delivers equal performance and image quality.

Assembly and Accessories

The M10S II’s carton gets the full cardboard treatment with no crumbly foam in sight. The panel, upright, and base assemble without tools. If you plan to use an arm, there’s a 100mm VESA mount with fasteners included. Also in the box are a DisplayPort cable, an external power brick, and a sheet of INZONE stickers, in case you want to decorate your Trapper Keeper.

Product 360

The M10S II’s most visible feature is its small-footprint base. Honestly, when I took it out of the box, I was dubious about its stability. It’s a heavy metal disc just six inches across. The upright bolts to its center with an offset that extends the depth to almost eight inches. It looks like it would fall over easily, but I gave it a few shakes, and it remained stable. This is geometry at work. The swivel point is where the upright and base meet, allowing you to swing the screen 360 degrees. You also get a 5/35-degree tilt and a 4.8-inch height range, no portrait mode, though. Movements are firm and smooth with no wobble or play.

Reach around the back right, and you’ll find a small protrusion with a power button and a joystick for the OSD. Uniquely, the power LED is positioned on the side, just the right spot to light up your hand when you press the button. It isn’t visible from the front, but you can turn it off if you wish.

The side view shows a thick component bulge attached to a thin screen backed by a metal plate. It’s just 5mm thick, and the bezel is narrow too: 7mm on top, 8mm on the sides, and 12mm at the bottom. It’s flush, so you can’t see it when the power’s off.

The I/O panel is up and under and includes two HDMI 2.1 ports, one DisplayPort 2.1, and USB, one upstream and two downstream ports. There are no internal speakers, so you can plug headphones into the 3.5mm jack. An additional USB port is there for service and firmware updates.

OSD Features

Pressing the M10S II’s joystick brings up an efficiently organized OSD. It’s divided into nine sections and has plenty of calibration and convenience options.

The OSD begins with picture modes, eight in total. The default is Game, and it looks good but needs a bit of tweaking to align it with broadcast standards. The other modes are aimed at specific game types or tasks, and there’s an accurate sRGB mode. I found the best results using Standard with a grayscale calibration, which you can read about below and on page four.

Gaming Assist includes the refresh rate switches and 24.5-inch modes which deliver 1080 vertical pixels while maintaining a 1:1 mapping. That way, there’s no scaling to soften the image. You also get motion blur reduction via a backlight strobe, which works well at low frame rates. It cuts brightness by around 30%. Anti-VRR flicker is unique to OLED monitors and prevents flickering during rapid frame-rate transitions. Hint: if your video card is fast enough to keep the action above 300 Hz, you won’t get flicker. Also in this menu are an FPS counter and aiming points, both static and dynamic.

In the Picture adjustment menu, you’ll find the variable brightness options, which Sony calls Brightness stabilizer. It’s counter to other monitors I’ve encountered, in that off means variable brightness is fully engaged. I experimented with all three settings and found the best gamma, and therefore quality, on the Mid setting. Also, here are gamma presets and color temps with a set of RGB sliders. There is no color gamut selector, but you can opt for sRGB in the sRGB picture mode.

For panel care, the M10S II includes pixel shift, a screen saver, and refresh routines. Sony differentiates between pixel and panel refresh. I ran the pixel refresh when I first powered up my sample. Selecting panel refresh prompted a message that it should only be run once a year, so I concluded it was a very aggressive refresh routine.

Sony INZONE M10S II Calibration Settings

The M10S II arrived set to its Game mode, which had a cool grayscale and light gamma. I could fix the grayscale but not the gamma, so I turned to Standard mode, which was much better. After a few clicks of the RGB sliders, I had much improved grayscale, gamma, and color tracking. The gamut volume is just under 110% of DCI-P3, which is too large for the SDR standard but looks great, nonetheless. If you want sRGB, it’s there in the preset mode list. It has good gamut accuracy and supports grayscale calibration but not gamma adjustment. My recommended settings are below.

For HDR content, the M10S II switches over automatically and provides four specific picture modes. Game works the best, and I noted that it allowed grayscale calibration and brightness adjustment. You can see those test results on page five.

Gaming and Hands-on

Sony’s marketing for the M10S II clearly targets competition and hardcore gamers, and for those users, it delivers. Whether you need 540 Hz or not, it is super quick. Motion resolution is perfect, which means moving objects and backgrounds have the same clarity as stationary elements. Camera pans are free from blur or smearing. Adaptive-Sync worked perfectly for me when using a GeForce RTX 4090 video card. Frame rates in Doom Eternal set to max detail ranged from 350 to 540fps.

The M10S II has a couple of features designed to reduce motion blur and smooth out the image, but I didn’t find any need for them. Anti-flicker, which I’ve seen from Asus as well, is there to remove any flickering during frame rate transitions. I saw plenty of those with rates rapidly shifting 80-100fps by the second. There was no flicker. You also get blur reduction via backlight strobe. It only works below 270 Hz, and since my speeds never went below that, it wasn’t needed. To engage it, turn off Adaptive-Sync first. The M10S II will automatically reduce the refresh rate. It works well and shows no evidence of phasing or ghosting.

Input lag is low enough that I perceived instant response to control inputs during the most frenetic battle maneuvers. My skills are average, but I see this monitor’s benefit to a competitive gamer. The 720 Hz mode felt super quick even though its input lag is only a tad lower. Full-screen resolution is limited to 1280x720, but you can achieve dizzying frame rates in the process. Also available are 24.5-inch modes in which the picture occupies a portion of the screen. You can do 1920x1080 at 720 Hz this way or opt for 2368x1332 pixels in a 1:1 mapping.

In all scenarios, color and clarity are as good as it gets for the OLED genre. The M10S II has a huge color gamut, almost 110% of DCI-P3, and that shows in both SDR and HDR content. HDR has the additional capability of calibration, something most HDR monitors cannot do. I also liked the variable brightness options. The terminology is a little counterintuitive in that when Brightness stabilizer is off, variable brightness is engaged at maximum. The other settings, Mid and High, are less aggressive at modulating light output. I found the best gamma, and therefore picture quality, came from the Mid option.

As a 27-inch QHD flat panel, the M10S II is well suited for productivity and delivers a clean and colorful picture for general use. Small text is sharp and free of color fringing. Graphics and photos are deeply textured, and video looks great as well. The monitor makes a great personal TV. The only things I noted missing were internal speakers and LED lighting. But everything you need for gaming, entertainment, and work is there.

Takeaway: The M10S II is a competitor’s dream with its speedy response, smooth motion resolution, and multitude of refresh and resolution options. It delivers a clean and colorful picture for both SDR and HDR content. The anti-glare layer is among the best I’ve seen, with no effects seen from ambient light reflections. It’s a premium purchase for sure, but there is nothing it cannot do well.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

540 Hz OLEDs aren’t common, and I could only find one other in my database to compare to the M10S II: Asus’ PG27AQWP. Also in the mix are Alienware’s AW2726DM, Gigabyte’s MO27Q28G, ViewSonic’s VX2738-2K, and Asus XG27AQWMG.

Pixel Response and Input Lag

Click here to read up on our pixel response and input lag testing procedures.

I can only include monitors tested with the Nvidia LDAT for a fair comparison, so I had to exclude the Asus screens from the response test results. The M10S II shows a difference between 540 and 720 Hz of 0.20 ms and 0.12 ms, respectively. You can’t see this difference as it is well below the human eye’s capabilities. Notice that the 240 Hz ViewSonic draws the one-inch white box in the same amount of time, and the Alienware is just behind at 0.24ms. Do you need a 540 Hz OLED? 240 Hz is enough for perfect motion resolution.

Faster refresh rates typically mean lower input lag, though not universally. The M10S II is quick at 14.9 ms, but again, it’s pipped by a 240 and a 280 Hz screen. At 720 Hz, it sits on top. Note the 540 Hz PG27AQWP can only muster 22ms. Is that a problem? Not if you consider that human reaction time is typically around 200ms.

Test Takeaway: The M10S II is certainly a fast monitor and among the quickest 27-inch QHD OLEDs currently available. It gains a slight advantage in test results at 720 Hz, but not enough to make a visible difference. If you can drive it at 540 Hz in QHD resolution, you’ll be rewarded with a superb feel and perfect motion resolution, with moving objects rendered as clearly as static ones.

Viewing Angles

The M10S II shows a barely visible red tint at 45 degrees from the center, in both horizontal and vertical orientations. This is likely due to the anti-glare coating, which makes it the least shiny screen I’ve encountered. There’s no reduction in light output or gamma, and even the top view has good detail rendering. This is excellent performance.

Screen Uniformity

To learn how we measure screen uniformity, click here.

The M10S II has screen uniformity on par with the best monitors I’ve measured, OLED and LCD alike. 2.55% is about as good as it gets. I used the pixel refresh routine right after unpacking, which took five minutes, then ran moving patterns on the panel for a few hours before starting my tests. This is excellent performance.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

To read about our monitor tests in-depth, please check out Display Testing Explained: How We Test PC Monitors. We cover brightness and contrast testing on page two.

Uncalibrated – Maximum Backlight Level

The M10S II includes both constant and variable brightness options. To find the peak luminance, I tested all three Brightness stabilizer settings. Off means variable brightness is fully engaged, measuring 478 nits with a 25% window pattern. A full field was 283 nits. Mid is 426 nits, and Off is the same 283 nits for any size window pattern or a full field. As you’ll see on the next page, Mid delivers the best gamma and is the setting I used for my hands-on tests. Black levels and contrast could not be measured.

After Calibration to 200 nits

Calibration doesn’t change black levels or contrast. I found the best gamma on the Mid setting of the Brightness stabilizer, so I used a 25% window to set the slider to 200 nits. This is typical OLED performance.

Test Takeaway: The M10S II has typical brightness and contrast compared to other OLED displays with a variable-brightness option. It stands out by having three options instead of two. It also performs best in gamma tests and looks the best when the Mid setting of the Brightness stabilizer is used.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

The M10S II includes a variety of picture modes tailored to different game types and tasks. They offer different levels of control for users who want to calibrate.

Grayscale and Gamma Tracking

Our grayscale and gamma tests use Calman calibration software from Portrait Displays. We describe our grayscale and gamma tests in detail here.

The M10S II’s Game mode is visibly cool in tone. No surprise, as its default color temp setting is neutral. You can find some relief from the Warm preset, but calibration is the best way to go. Gamma is a tad light as well. Adjustments also affect color tracking, which you’ll see just below.

The RGB sliders are a bit coarse in operation, so I couldn’t quite get all the errors below 1dE. But aside from 90 and 100% brightness, they are all under 2dE, not too bad. I switched to Standard mode as well, which has better gamma. Though it’s a little skewed, more of it sticks close to 2.2, so the picture gains some texture and depth. This is solid performance.

I measured the sRGB mode at its default settings. You can’t change brightness or gamma, but you can adjust the color temperature. The above result shows the default state. Gamma is too light in the darker parts of the image, while highlights are a tad dark.

Comparisons

The M10S II’s out-of-box grayscale is clearly blue in tone. A 6.17dE error is visible to the naked eye. Changing the color temp to warm improves it; it measures around 3dE. The best option is to calibrate, which brings the error down to 1.51dE. Then, there is no visible issue.

In the gamma test, the range of values is a bit wider than the other monitors, at 0.18 (low to high). But the numbers stay close to 2.2, so the deviation is only 0.45%; the actual value is 2.21. This is mainly because I changed the picture mode from Game to Standard.

Color Gamut Accuracy

Our color gamut and volume testing use Portrait Displays’ Calman software. For details on our color gamut testing and volume calculations, click here.

The first chart is the main reason why the Game mode isn’t the best choice. The blue grayscale pulls the gamut tracking off target, resulting in visible hue errors across every color. Yellow is too green; magenta is too blue, and so on. The good part is that there is linear oversaturation, which delivers richer color without going over the top to a cartoonish look.

You can see what a difference calibration makes. Hue errors are now almost gone, and saturation points are at or near target. This makes a visible improvement in picture quality, making it look more natural.

Comparisons

It’s nigh impossible to find a bad OLED when it comes to color. Though the M10S II isn’t at the top of this group, it has no visible errors once calibrated. 2.22dE is still in the realm of excellent performance. I noted that the sRGB average error was 1.34 dE.

In the volume test, the M10S II proved itself to be one of the most colorful monitors you can buy in this category. OLED gamuts don’t get much bigger than 109.5% of DCI-P3. The 96.61% sRGB coverage is nearly ideal. The M10S II is suitable for color-critical work once calibrated.

Test Takeaway: The M10S II doesn’t come out of the box in its most accurate picture mode, but a few tweaks in the OSD take performance to a higher level. You can simply select the Standard picture mode with Warm color temp or calibrate for the best possible result. The sRGB mode is also accurate, and unlike most monitors, it can be calibrated for grayscale tracking. The M10S II’s overall color performance is on par with other premium OLED displays.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

Our HDR benchmarking uses Portrait Displays’ Calman software. To learn about our HDR testing, see our breakdown of how we test PC monitors.

The M10S II accepts HDR10 signals and switches automatically to reveal four new picture modes. I noted that some adjustments were possible, which is unusual in a good way. Most monitors have no HDR picture options.

HDR Brightness and Contrast

The M10S II’s brightest HDR picture mode is also the default, Game. A 25% window pattern measures over 543 nits, which puts it mid-pack in this comparison. In practice, and with its infinite black levels, it delivers punchy images with deep shadows and bright highlights with sharp detail throughout.

Grayscale, EOTF and Color

In the grayscale and EOTF test, the M10S II in Game mode proved to be one of the most accurate HDR monitors I’ve reviewed. The first chart above shows grayscale after a couple of tweaks to the RGB sliders. It’s one of the few HDR monitors that allow color adjustments. The EOTF tracks very closely to the reference with a correct tone-map transition at 68% brightness. This is where it should be given the measured white and black points.

In the color test, there is significant oversaturation in red and just typical oversaturation in blue and green. This isn’t all that different from other HDR displays, but some red-dominant images I viewed showed clipping. Most HDR monitors are engineered this way, but Sony goes a bit further than others. Hue tracking is good, though with only slight deviations in yellow and magenta. In the BT.2020 test, the M10S II runs out of color at 90% red, 80% green, and 98% blue.

Test Takeaway: The M10S II has superb HDR luminance and grayscale tracking. Color is a little oversaturated, but most users will not complain about a monitor this colorful. It fills more of the BT.2020 color space than nearly every monitor I’ve reviewed, including professional models. Brightness is on the high side of average with punchy highlights and deep shadows, all well detailed.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

Based on the number of gaming monitors on offer, Sony might not be the first brand one thinks of, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t among the best. Its model line may be small, but it is no less mighty. Competitors looking for the fastest and most flexible OLED display should take a closer look at the INZONE M10S II.

With a 540 Hz refresh rate at QHD resolution, the M10S II delivers speed right out of the gate. Then it adds performance options like 720 Hz at HD and two 24.5-inch modes that sport 1920x1080 and 2368x1332 resolutions with 1:1 pixel mapping. Add in blur reduction and anti-flicker, and you have a monitor that delivers smooth, responsive gaming on any PC or console.

Image quality is given equal attention. The OLED panel used here covers almost 110% of DCI-P3 and, with a few tweaks, delivers a color-accurate picture with the deep contrast and true blacks OLEDs are known for. The M10S II also includes variable brightness and HDR calibration, features not found in many OLED displays. I also noted the matte screen coating, which rejected ambient light better than any other OLED I’ve reviewed.

The Sony INZONE M10S II is a premium purchase for sure, and though it doesn’t include internal speakers or LED lighting, it performs on par with the very best. If you have the budget and you want a competition weapon for your gaming PC or console, you should definitely check it out.

MORE: Best Gaming Monitors

MORE: How We Test PC Monitors

MORE: How to Buy a PC Monitor

GameStop is bringing some of its recently closed stores back to life. The company announced on social media that “select closed stores” are reopening nationwide starting September 11, although it has not revealed exactly how many locations will return. When asked about the number of stores involved, a GameStop spokesperson reportedly told IGN that the count was “at least one” as of September 11, suggesting that we can expect more details to follow.

The move comes after GameStop reportedly had one of its biggest rounds of store closures listed for January 2026. According to a blog tracking the closures, around 470 locations across the U.S. were listed as either confirmed to close or already closed, as the retailer continued efforts to cut costs and improve profitability. GameStop had already closed hundreds of stores during the previous fiscal year, making the latest shutdowns part of a much larger reduction in its physical retail footprint.

GameStop's decision to reopen select physical stores is notably interesting given the wider shift away from physical game media. Digital downloads have replaced physical discs, while console manufacturers are increasingly offering hardware without disc drives. Recently, Sony took the shift even further after sharing its plans to stop producing new physical PlayStation game discs by January 2028. While that has resulted in a considerable backlash from the gaming community as a whole, Sony did clarify that existing titles can continue to be reordered and disc production will not simply disappear overnight.

It is worth mentioning that GameStop's business has moved beyond physical games. CEO Ryan Cohen said in July that software accounted for less than 12% of the company's business, although GameStop's fiscal 2025 filings put software, including physical games and digital download codes, at 20.1% of sales. Collectibles have become increasingly important, accounting for 29.2% of fiscal 2025 revenue and growing 47.7% year over year. This could explain why GameStop is potentially comfortable reopening selected stores despite the decline of physical games. That being said, it is safe to consider the announcement as a limited reopening rather than a complete reversal of GameStop's broader strategy.

Sony Japan has officially implemented a new customer harassment policy to address ongoing customer backlash, following the company’s controversial announcement to phase out physical PlayStation game discs by January 2028. In an official publication on September 1, the company outlined prohibited customer behaviors to protect the dignity and safety of its employees and threatened to suspend customer service if the behaviors continued.

“The dignity and safety of our employees must not be threatened by customer harassment, such as words or demands from customers that exceed what is considered reasonable according to social norms,” the publication read. “If any behavior constituting customer harassment is confirmed, we may restrict or suspend customer service in order to protect the safety of our employees.”

Some of the examples of customer harassment detailed in the publication include “persistent and repeated, or prolonged, demands; excessive or unreasonable demands for compensation; abusive language, threats, slander, and other similar behaviors; requests unrelated to products or services; intimidating attitude; discriminatory or sexual conduct; and attacks and demands against individual employees.

The company also listed “forcing someone to prostrate themselves,” visiting company grounds without permission, and excessively asking for apologies as customer harassment, expressing willingness to use legal force if necessary. “We will take a firm stance against such actions and aim to build healthy and sustainable relationships while respecting both our customers and employees,” it said. “If we deem it necessary, we will cooperate with the police, lawyers, etc., and consider taking action, including legal measures and criminal proceedings.”

The new policies appear to be in response to the intense backlash over Sony's decision to end physical disc production by 2028. The decision was met with immediate, widespread backlash from the gaming community, which argued — among other things — that ending physical discs was equivalent to eliminating true ownership. Critics also argued that digital purchases were rentals and placed too much power in the company's hands, which could restrict access at will. Just 6 days after the July 1st announcement, a Change.org petition to stop the move had amassed 200,000 signatures and is now approaching 400,000.

The company doesn't appear to be backing down. After a class action lawsuit related to Sony’s decision to kill physical discs, the company moved to force the case into out-of-court arbitration, arguing that “reasonable consumers would not be misled into believing they own digital games.” The plaintiffs allege that Sony misleads consumers by using "Buy" buttons for digital PlayStation games without clearly disclosing that buyers are only purchasing a temporary, revocable license rather than actual, permanent ownership of the game.

Several other related lawsuits are ongoing. Regardless, Sony has said it will "cautiously move forward" with its decision despite “strong views” from players. The company hopes its new customer harassment policy will curb some of the backlash individual employees are currently facing. The policies also align with Japan's recent law that mandates companies to take measures to prevent customer harassment towards their workers.

Sony Interactive Entertainment asked a federal judge on August 21 to push a proposed class action lawsuit over the PlayStation Store’s “buy” and “purchase” labels out of court and into individual arbitration. In doing so, Sony is invoking a clause in the same terms of service that the four litigants suing it in Heycock v. Sony Corporation of America argue aren’t presented clearly enough at checkout to satisfy California law.

The June lawsuit alleges that Sony sells revocable game licenses behind “Buy Now” and “Confirm Purchase” buttons without the disclosures required by AB 2426, California’s digital goods law. That law, which came into effect on January 1, 2025, requires that companies clearly disclose when consumers are obtaining a revocable license to access “digital goods,” the definition of which includes games, and prohibits storefronts from using words like “buy” or “purchase” when a license is being granted.

Four PlayStation owners, Andrew Garcia, Edward Heycock, Jason Mendoza, and Josh Salinas, filed the complaint on June 18 in the Northern District of California, pleading violations of Business and Professions Code § 17500.6, the state’s False Advertising Law, and the Consumer Legal Remedies Act on behalf of a proposed class of California purchasers.

The purchases the plaintiffs are pleading all post-date the statute’s January 1, 2025 effective date: Garcia bought NBA 2K25 for $20.99 on March 27, 2025, then NBA 2K26 and Madden NFL 26 for $65.99 and $69.99, respectively, on August 11, 2025. The complaint alleges that these transactions convey “only a limited, revocable license,” while the language used on the PlayStation Store communicates ownership. The four plaintiffs claim they sent two CLRA demand letters on April 21, 2026, and May 11, 2026, respectively, which Sony didn’t answer.

See you in court

Section 14 of the PlayStation Terms of Service requires U.S. users to resolve disputes through binding individual arbitration and waives class actions, unless the user mails a written opt-out to Sony’s legal department in San Mateo within 30 days of accepting the terms. Sony’s motion attached three versions of those terms as exhibits dated August 2023, March 2025, and April 2026, along with the Software Product License Agreement, covering the window in which the proposed class members accepted them. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed co-defendant Sony Corporation of America on August 20, one day before Sony’s motion, leaving Sony Interactive Entertainment as the sole defendant.

Some readers — especially those outside the U.S. — may be surprised to learn that corporations can contractually block their customers from suing them in court. The foundation for this is the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925, which makes arbitration agreements “valid, irrevocable, and enforceable,” and the Supreme Court’s 2011 decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, which held that the Act overrides state rules treating class action waivers in consumer contracts as unenforceable. Sony added the arbitration clause to the PlayStation Network terms in September 2011, months after that ruling.

The clause isn’t bulletproof: California’s McGill v. Citibank ruling bars contracts from waiving a consumer’s right to seek a public injunction, and the present Heycock complaint is asking for an injunction against Sony’s checkout practices. The plaintiffs’ response to Sony’s motion is due by September 4, and we can expect the plaintiffs to argue that at least the injunctive claims belong in court.

Both Sony’s motion and the plaintiffs’ response will then be heard by Judge Vince Chhabria on October 1st in San Francisco. Its fallback asks Judge Chhabria to dismiss the case outright on the grounds that the checkout flow already complies with California law, with Sony’s filing arguing that “reasonable consumers would not be misled” into believing they own digital games because buyers agree to the license terms via the Software Product License Agreement before the purchase is finalized. Quoting Section 8.4 of the PlayStation Terms of Service, the motion states that a purchase buys “a personal license” and that users “do not own the product,” and Section 1 of the SPLA, which reads: “The software is licensed to you, not sold.” Sony’s lawyers, then, appear to contend that digital purchasers inherently understand that they can’t own a game the way they’d own a physical object, since a digital copy isn’t exclusive to any one buyer.

The filing also argues that claims over digital game ownership are highly unlikely (prima facie implausible), pointing to the plaintiffs’ own purchase histories in what is either a wild display of mental gymnastics or a bad-faith attempt to argue that, in saying they own the games they’ve purchased, the plaintiffs are trying to stake a claim to owning the game IP outright, which they obviously don’t. Sony highlights that Heycock bought Resident Evil Requiem for $69.99 on February 25, 2026, 11 days after co-plaintiff Jason Mendoza bought the same game, and argues that if a purchase conveyed ownership, Mendoza would have owned the title and Heycock’s transaction couldn’t have happened.

California's AB 2426

California Assembly Bill 2426 took effect on January 1, 2025, and bars sellers of revocable digital goods from using language like “buy” and “purchase,” or any term that a reasonable person would read as conferring ownership, unless the seller collects an affirmative acknowledgment that the transaction is a license or displays a clear and conspicuous statement, distinct from other T&Cs, before checkout.

Subscriptions, free content, and games offered for permanent offline download are exempt, and violations carry potential misdemeanor liability and civil penalties. Valve added a license disclaimer banner to Steam’s shopping cart within weeks of the bill’s signing in 2024. Sony’s checkout, meanwhile, links to the Terms of Service and license agreement in fine print but requires no acknowledgment and shows no separate statement.

The only real precedent on AB 2426 is Casell v. Ubisoft, which reached no ruling on digital ownership. Players sued in November 2024 over the server shutdown that rendered The Crew unplayable, but their purchases and the filing itself predated § 17500.6, so the statute was never applied to the case. The plaintiffs voluntarily dismissed the federal action in June 2025, refiled in Sacramento County Superior Court, and reached a class settlement with Ubisoft that’s now in the approval process.

The plaintiffs’ opposition to Sony’s motion is due September 4, and Sony’s reply is due September 11, ahead of the October 1 hearing. The dispute runs alongside Sony’s controversial intent to wind down physical media production for new PlayStation releases and comes months after a firmware change briefly convinced players that digital games required an online check-in every 30 days.

A Sony PlayStation 3 console modder has shared images and details of their ‘PS3 Pro v3’ design. On the PS3 subreddit, Fun-Equivalent-7785 showcases this project, which includes a heavily customized 3D-printed top case, dual Noctua fans, and liberal use of tin foil. While you may love or hate the new aesthetic, the results seem impressive, with the PS3 overclocked like a champ and running very cool and quiet.

Yes, this is at least the third PS3 Pro mod from Fun-Equivalent-7785, but all projects benefit from refinement. PC builders will be familiar with the dread of unwrapping their motherboards and seeing the revision number is v1.0.0, contrasting with the pleasure of seeing v1.0.3. Moving swiftly back on topic, you can look and read about the first version of this PS3 Pro project here, and there’s also a video about the PS3 Pro v2.

In some comments following the original post, Fun-Equivalent-7785 provides more technical details about the PS Pro v3 mod. They claim that the processors aren’t delidded, nor undervolted. Instead, they have installed “server heatsinks” on Sony’s custom PS3 processors. In front of these, one can clearly see two chunky Noctua fans, presumably pushing much air through the heatsink fins. Tinfoil has been used to shape the ducting. The Noctua fans are somewhat wider than the heatsinks, and overall it is “super silent.”

One screenshot shows an overlay from the ‘PS3 Pro v3’ running. Specifically, we can see the CPU is 40 degrees Celsius, the Reality Synthesizer (AKA the RSX, a GPU) is 42 degrees Celsius, while the fans are only rotating at 24% max RPM. This is while the RSX is overclocked to 750 MHz core and 1,000 MHz memory. A stock PS3 would achieve around 500 MHz core and 650 MHz memory.

Those uprated numbers result in broadly improved performance in PS3 gaming. “Almost every game has a boost in FPS,” crows Fun-Equivalent-7785. The results seem pretty worthwhile, especially if you like the look of this design from Fun-Equivalent-7785.

While it is an interesting project that might inspire you to do something similar with your old PS3, there are some aspects to modding like this that you have to consider. This particular project isn’t a ‘product’ so you can’t just buy a kit to copy it. There aren't yet 3D printer resource files shared on GitHub or similar. We are also not aware of any other shared resources to make it easy for other modders to replicate the PS3 Pro v3 project.

Lastly, please remember, before you risk your precious PS3 under the knife, there can be risks to modding. For example, there are many opportunities to inflict accidental physical damage to electronics when undertaking DIY projects like this. Moreover, overclocking may shorten the lifespan of your console's components, and applying unofficial firmware has the potential to soft- or hard-brick your system.

Sony’s decision to end physical game production by 2028 is facing backlash from the community, with one group announcing a concrete protest. DoesItPlay, a community dedicated to video game preservation, has called for a one-week boycott of PlayStation, asking players to turn off their consoles or log out of the PlayStation Network from August 23 to 30. According to its Bluesky post, the community, along with other creators, is calling for a one-week #PSBlackout starting tomorrow, asking for “No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony’s platforms.”

Unfortunately, many say this move likely won't make much of an impact. That’s because the last week of August is “ordinary,” with no major events or PlayStation-related launches. In fact, it’s also the same week as Gamescom, so many hardcore gamers would likely be away and at the convention anyway. Some comments on DoesItPlay’s post suggest more drastic measures, like a mass cancellation of PSN subscriptions for three months or even mass refunds of pre-selling digital games, arguing that a boycott or blackout with an expiry date is meaningless, as Sony will simply wait it out.

Other users are showing their displeasure with the move towards digital-only releases in more drastic ways. One example of this is Cyberleek, who leaked gameplay clips and the entire map of Leonidas a week before GTA VI’s extended look trailer is set to come out on Netflix. Take-Two is already taking steps to find out who was behind the leaks, but only after it became apparent that the hacker apparently has a full working build of the much-anticipated game. While the leaker did not mention anything about Sony’s plan to go fully digital, Cyberleek opposed the decision to offer pre-selling digital copies of GTA VI and threatened to keep releasing leaks until the publisher issues a public apology and “a concrete commitment to be better.”

Sony wants to abandon fans? Let's give them a small taste of their own medicine!Together with other creators we call for a 1 week #PSBlackout in August. No logins, no play sessions, no purchases on any of Sony's platforms.

— @doesitplay.org (@doesitplay.org.bsky.social) 2026-08-23T02:04:05.199Z

The gaming industry has been slowly moving away from physical media and toward fully digital releases, especially with the prevalence of the Steam and Epic storefronts. However, what many do not realize is that “buying” games from most of these services does not equate to ownership—something Steam had to clarify on its checkout page in 2024.

The only major distributor that currently offers complete ownership is GOG, which says, “A purchase of a digital content on GOG grants you its Offline Installers, which cannot be taken away from you.” Subscriptions like PC Game Pass have also started offering short-term convenience for gamers, especially those who only want to play something for a while and don’t mind losing access to the game after they’ve already completed or grown tired of it.

Companies like Sony are likely reacting to market preferences for digital games, which is probably why it doubled down on its decision to axe physical game discs. One way consumers can force these tech companies to keep physical distribution alive is by putting their money where their mouth is and start purchasing game discs from retailers instead of downloading them from online storefronts.

A Change.org petition urging Sony to keep making physical PlayStation games has passed 172,000 signatures, six days after the company announced that it intends to stop producing discs for new games in January 2028. The petition, started by Jade Pearce, CEO of Canadian retailer PNP Games, climbed from around 12,000 signatures on its first day to more than 172,000 by the morning of July 7. Sony hasn’t responded, and the factory that prints its discs has already started moving some staff and equipment onto a different product.

Pearce launched the campaign the same day as Sony's announcement, and it gathered 40,000 names within 48 hours. The petition contends that a boxed download code is a revocable license rather than owned property, references Sony's recent removal of purchased movies from customer accounts, and lists the used-game trade among the jobs at risk. "We are not against digital," Pearce writes. "We are against digital being the only option."

Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad estimated that Sony sold more than 70 million physical discs in 2025, even with digital purchases sitting at roughly 80% of full-game sales. Sony's PlayStation social accounts have stayed dormant since July 1.

Sony DADC's plant in Thalgau, Austria, produces about 600,000 discs a day, roughly half of them PlayStation titles, and has begun shifting some workers onto optical microlens production, DADC CEO Dietmar Tanzer told Austrian broadcaster ORF Salzburg. The company has put €30 million ($34 million) into new equipment, according to Engadget, expects disc output to fall to about 10% of current volume by 2028, and plans to retrain roughly 300 staff rather than lay them off.

Optical microlenses steer and concentrate light across very small distances and appear in camera modules, AR and VR headsets, fiber-optic gear, and automotive lighting. Markus Streibl, head of micro optics at Sony DADC, said mass production could begin as early as 2027.

The PlayStation 6 is reportedly in development without a built-in disc drive, which would leave Sony's hardware team to reintegrate one if the company changed course. Sony's standalone PS5 disc drive has carried a one-per-order purchase cap since at least March last year, predating the disc announcement, and leaked PS6 specifications described in earlier reports frame any drive as an optional backward-compatibility accessory. Grand Theft Auto 6, easily the biggest game of the decade so far, will ship on PlayStation as a boxed download code with no playable disc, ahead of the 2028 cutoff.

Sony has told publishers they can still book disc runs for games released in 2027 or earlier, so existing physical libraries will keep working on supported consoles. Whether the fact that the petition is now pushing 200,000 signatures will compel Sony to move or abandon the January 2028 date is unclear; Sony delayed its 2021 shutdown of the PS3 and PS Vita stores after similar backlash, though that closure is now scheduled again alongside the disc decision.

Sony makes some of the best headphones on the market, and some of their recent models even include a myriad of sensors for spatial audio. These are standard gyroscopes and accelerometers capable of precise tracking, so why keep them limited to just audio features? That's exactly what developer Nicholas Slattery has done with his new project called "Sony Head Tracker" — it's an app that turns your Sony headphones and earbuds into a real-time head tracker for PC games.

The app essentially acts as a bridge between the hardware and the software, which is OpenTrack. Sony baked the Android Head Tracker protocol into its headphones' firmware, which is what enabled spatial audio to expand the soundstage on supported devices. This data is ignored by Windows, but Slattery figured out a way to tap into the protocol and read everything it's capturing.

That includes rotation vectors, gyroscope fields, and Euler Angles (live calculation of yaw, pitch, and roll). The raw data packets are then packaged into a UDP stream that the OpenTrack software can read and understand. OpenTrack supports over 200 PC games and usually works with phones, webcams, and specialized eye or IR trackers, but Slattery's app opens it to an entirely new and ingenious set of devices.

Currently, Sony's WH/WF-1000XM6, WH/WF-1000XM5, and Sony ULT WEAR (WH-ULT900N) are officially compatible. Older models like the WH-1000XM4 or XM3 won't work because they lack the hardware (sensors) required for the head tracking. Apple's AirPods, which popularized Spatial Audio, use the company's proprietary protocol that doesn't open itself up on any device, as you'd expect, so they're also ruled out.

Once everything is set up, you just wear your Sony headphones and the in-camera will respond to your head movements, turning around with you. If you look to the side or glance up, the camera will peep there as well, as if you were wearing a VR headset. But keep in mind that this is not a VR replacement as the screen in front of you is still stationary. Regardless, this unlocks another level of immersion for race and flight sims.

The creator has tested the app to work flawlessly with Microsoft Flight Simulator, Elite Dangerous, and Assetto Corsa already. For those of us not rocking elaborate multi-monitor configs, something like this can serve as a middle ground between a true 6DoF setup and a simple helmet cam in-game, all for free. Sony Head Tracker is also open-source, so we only expect it to improve over time and expand its compatibility.

Sony's one-per-order purchase limit on the PS5 Disc Drive, widely cited this week as a response to panic buying after the company said it will end physical disc production for new PlayStation games in January 2028, has been on PlayStation Direct since at least March 2025. Archived captures of the product page cited by HotHardware carry the same wording, "Due to high demand, there is a limit of 1 per order," more than a year before Sony's announcement. Meanwhile, the largest petition against the disc cutoff sat beyond 74,000 signatures on the morning of July 4th, closing in on its 75,000 goal.

Sony did add something to the product page this week: a bolded notice stating that from January 2028, newly released PlayStation games will be sold on the PlayStation Store and at retailers in digital format only, and that discs for games released before that date will continue to play on supported consoles. We checked the live U.S. listing today and found both the new notice and the long-standing order limit, along with a line warning that household limits may apply.

The detachable drive, $79.99 at retail, is the only way to play physical games or Blu-ray movies on the PS5 Digital Edition and PS5 Pro, neither of which comes with one. eBay listings for the accessory reached $100 to $130 this week, according to HotHardware, which also noted that Best Buy stocks the drive at retail price with no order limit. Sony hasn't said whether it intends to keep manufacturing the drive after the disc cutoff, or how long the PlayStation Direct restriction will remain in place.

A Change.org petition organized by Jade Pearce, CEO of Canadian game retailer PNP Games, gathered more than 74,000 signatures in three days, and Push Square counted at least 15 separate petitions urging Sony to reverse course. The backlash has already spread beyond petitions, with various companies poking fun at Sony's decision, including GitHub, which announced that it'll begin offering CD-ROM copies of public repositories as a jab at the decision.

Regardless, Sony's disc manufacturing plans appear to be set in stone. PlayStation output accounts for roughly half of the volume at Sony DADC's plant in Thalgau, Austria, with new game disc orders making up around 20% of that share, CEO Dietmar Tanzer told Austrian broadcaster ORF in comments reported by Wccftech. The site's roughly 300 workers are being retrained to produce optical microlenses, with mass production of the new line set to begin in early 2027, a year before the disc cutoff takes effect.

Brian “Biscuit” Watson, a game developer whose work spans four decades, recently went on YouTube to tell some of his stories. One of the most interesting revelations he shared on The Retro Collective was the existence of the PlayStation 1 controller prototype, called the PlayStation Puga, that housed an entire PlayStation 1 console. Watson said that this “handheld” was specifically built for the Brazilian market, which had tight import regulations, and was also intended to be manufactured within the country. It was also supposed to come with 4GB of memory that could hold 10 games, and four AA-sized batteries apparently power it and connect to your TV via an included cable.

The prototype was working really well, but it encountered issues with game titles that were intended for inclusion. “The unfortunate problem is that Sony licensing couldn’t get their act together about the royalty terms for each of the games. So, it’s like they’re trying to get in touch with Rockstar and a few other places, and they were wanting way too much in the way of royalties,” Watson said. “But what really stuck in my craw with that one was even if it was a Sony game, they had to negotiate with a separate unit of Sony, and they were never happy about how much royalty they were getting.”

Since the gaming controller and console combo was designed to sell at a low price, they expected to make only 10 cents per unit sold and were unhappy with the pricing. Since it seemed Sony would not be able to ship any games with the PS1 controller console, it canceled the entire project.

Watson actually showed the completed controller to the present audience, but it unfortunately doesn’t run. It does boot into the debug stub, but he doesn’t have any of the other required software to make it run. Still, it’s equipped with an Arm-based processor running at 650 MHz and emulated the PlayStation 1 pretty well. It also lasted about 20 hours on a single set of four AA batteries, which is an impressive feat for the time (and still is today). Nevertheless, the project was not wasted at the emulator built for that system eventually found its way into the Sony Xperia Play.

GitHub has announced that it will be giving developers a way to obtain their public repo on a CD-ROM. Thanks to this initiative, a dev will be able to obtain a physical copy of their code and “Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.” This would be a very unusual offer from GitHub without the context of Sony’s official announcement, stating that it will cease the production and distribution of PlayStation games via physical media in 2028.

Above you can see that GitHub is lending its voice to those who reckon Sony’s move is wrong or, at best, premature. The coding and collaboration platform, owned by Microsoft, states that “In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM.” Moreover, it appeals to the human side of computing, adding the emotive line “Keep it. Lend it to friends. Pass it on to your children.”

It isn’t April 1^st, so thankfully this is no joke. However, if you check out the above-linked GitHub Your Code, On a CD offer page, it quickly becomes clear this is a very limited in time/scope stunt.

“Order a burned CD of your own public GitHub repo. Yes, a real physical disc you can hold in your hands, no download required,” begins the spiel. But this is a very limited run of 1,000 discs, with applications required between July 2 and July 6 (inclusive). Limit one per person, with availability varying between country/region.

“Your code is physically yours, forever. Until you lose it, let's be real,” says GitHub. At best, these CDs will be framed and put on a wall, some becoming collector’s items or eBay money spinners (discs like 0001 or 0888 would be good ones, if they are numbered). Also, many will be lost or eventually/accidentally discarded, as GitHub seems to know. So this 'protest' is arguably 1,000 doses of expensively shipped e-waste.

Circling back to the context of this GitHub story, it is clear it is a small protest at Sony essentially ringing the death knell for physical media in modern gaming. Consoles were already rolling inexorably down this road with the cheaper digital edition hardware releases, and other games industry players are pushing in the same direction. Digital-only isn’t likely going to end up well for gamers, archivists, second-hand stores, and others – with used game media disappearing from the scene, to name but one impending issue.

Sony has unceremoniously informed its PlayStation customers in the United Kingdom that 551 movies from StudioCanal will be removed from their accounts on September 1, 2026. If you bought any of the films included in this list, you'll no longer be able to access them. There is no workaround, no method to offload them to another device; just absolute, emotionless deletion that doesn't even offer refunds.

The lineup includes some truly legendary movies such as Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, Mulholland Drive, Moonlight, and Dawn Till Dusk — essentially every film that StudioCanal distributed in the UK. Sony cites licensing agreements between it and the French company as the reason behind the sudden removal. The announcement doesn't include any other details beyond the list of the affected films.

Sony began selling movies and shows on the PlayStation Store in 2008. During the PS3 era, you could actually transfer the content to view on other devices, but that feature was removed on the PS4. In 2021, after the PS5 had launched, Sony stopped selling films and TV series entirely on PSN, which meant that it likely wouldn't renew contractual agreements with studios and distributors going forward.

The only exception to this rule was in 2023, when Sony began a similar deletion spree of Discovery Network shows but signed a new licensing deal to keep them on the platform. It remains to be seen whether public backlash can usher in a similar response for StudioCanal movies this time. You might not have heard its name before, but the studio is responsible for bringing countless popular movies to the UK.

For now, this is yet another distressing reminder of the digital precedent corporations have set for us. You no longer truly own any digital content you purchase; rather, it's just being licensed to you indefinitely. And you agree to this precedent "willingly" when you accept all those terms and conditions that veil ownership rights under fine print.

The moment the provider decides it's not viable to maintain said content, you're at risk of losing access to something you already paid for. It's like a subscription service with extra steps — as if people aren't growing wary enough of those already — except it was never advertised like that.

Sony just increased the price for refurbished PlayStation 5 Slim consoles by $100, bringing the Digital Edition to $499 and the disc drive model to $549. The original PS5 and Fortnite bundle now also appears out of stock at the time of writing, so you can no longer get a brand-new PS5 Digital Edition for just $399. You can see these changes on the Sony website, with u/FernandoRocker sharing the bad news to the r/PS5 subreddit yesterday.

At the moment, the cheapest PS5 you can get is still the original console for $399, although this is a refurbished model. If you want a brand-new unit, you have no choice but to shell out $599 for the PS5 Digital Edition console, or get the Ghost of Yotei Black Limited-Edition Bundle for the same price if you want the version with an optical drive.

The original and Slim versions of the PS5 have almost the same specifications, except for a couple of minor changes — the latter has a larger 1TB internal storage (versus 825GB) and comes with two USB-C ports (instead of a USB-C and a USB-A port). Otherwise, you’re not missing out on much. So, if the budget is tight, you can get the cheaper original refurbished model and then upgrade your console with one of the best PS5 SSDs later, when you have extra cash.

The company did not make any official announcements about the price increases, so this came as a surprise to some of its fans. This also isn’t the recent price hike that Sony made on the PlayStation 5. Just last month, it increased prices across all its new consoles, with the Digital Edition models (both original and Slim) getting a $100 bump, while the PS5 Pro went from $749.99 to $899.99. Even the PlayStation Portal now costs $50 more, at $249.99.

Price hikes for brand-new consoles are understandable, especially given the ongoing memory and storage chip crisis. However, it’s unclear why refurbished PS5 Slim consoles now also cost more. After all, the original refurbished PS5 still costs the same, so we cannot chalk this up to increased labor costs.

Unfortunately, without official guidance from Sony, we can only speculate about why it increased its prices. It’s possible that the company did this to reduce demand for used Slim edition PS5s so they wouldn't run out of stock. After all, if the price difference for a new console is just $100, quite a few buyers would rather go for a brand-new model than a refurbished one.

A PC gaming enthusiast and tinkerer has shared a video demo of the new DS5Dongle. As its name suggests, this is a Windows PC dongle for users of the Sony DualSense controller. Its raison d'être is that it allows users of Sony’s well-regarded controller to enjoy wireless connectivity without the lack of adaptive triggers and haptic feedback that this connectivity choice on Windows PCs previously entailed. We would also give bonus points for the low cost (<$20) and purported low latency of this generously MIT-licensed dongle design.

The brains behind this project are provided by a developer known as awalol on GitHub, linked above. However, the video and Reddit announcement from SlaveKnightSoman neatly encapsulate the experience of using a DS5Dongle. The Redditor explains that they were attracted to this GitHub project as they had “spent way too much time trying to get the ‘PS5 Experience’ on PC without being tethered by a 3-meter cable.”

There are some technical reasons behind the reduced DualSense features on Windows PCs using wireless connectivity. Windows Bluetooth can’t handle the full non-standard use of Bluetooth bandwidth that Sony leverages to make its controllers work so well on the PS5. In contrast, the full gamut of controller features is available if Windows users use a wired version.

This is where the new DS5Dongle comes in, and it is also succinctly described as a “Pico2W DualSense 5 Bridge” by the developer. In brief, the dongle pairs with the DualSense over Bluetooth, receives the full gamut of haptic, trigger, audio, and other controller data, then exposes itself to its Windows host as a wired DualSense, and neither side is the wiser.

As what might be described as a ‘handshake spoof’ rather than some kind of emulation or translation layer, the latency should stay low. The experience of Redditor SlaveKnightSoman goes a long way to confirming that important factor, and they assert that “I didn't feel any difference to wired. But I only play single player games.” See the Reddit embedded Days Gone gaming footage to help judge for yourself.

DS5Dongle plans, details, and other useful resources are available via GitHub, so you can make your own. SlaveKnightSoman says they built one for under $20, including the cost of the Raspberry Pi Pico 2W, central to the dongle’s functionality. That could be worth it if you feel that the DualSense is one of the best controllers out there.

Dual-mode gaming monitors are becoming more commonplace among the best gaming monitors, and Sony is getting in on the action with the Inzone M10S II. This is a relatively heavy refresh of the existing Inzone M10S that's currently available. While the Inzone M10S offers up to a 480 Hz refresh rate at its native QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution, the Inzone M10S II ups that to 540 Hz.

But Sony didn't stop there; the Inzone M10S II is also dual-mode capable, so if you drop the resolution to 720p, you can enjoy up to a 720 Hz refresh rate if you have one of the best graphics cards for gaming that can spit out pixels fast enough. For those who like to partake in eSports games at a professional level, that's a strong showing for the monitor. The Inzone M10S II also uses a new fourth-generation LG WOLED panel with Primary RGB Tandem technology infused.

Sony also made some other enhancements to make the Inzone M10S II more flexible. The standard matte display coating has been enhanced with what it calls a Super Anti-Glare Film to further minimize distracting reflections (which can be burdensome in brightly lit gaming arenas). Panel response time has dipped slightly from 0.03 ms (GTG) to 0.02 ms, and there is now motion blur reduction with a brightness compensator. The maximum refresh rate with MBR enabled is 270 Hz at QHD resolution.

The Inzone M10S II also features an improved 1080p (4:3 aspect ratio) display mode that reduces the displayed panel size from 27 inches to 24.5 inches. Sony also added Anti-VRR flicker support to the monitor, and it is supported in the 24.5-inch display resolution mode.

One helpful addition is a dynamic crosshair that adjusts its colors based on the background. This ensures that your crosshair is visible in an environment and was explicitly added following feedback Sony received from players during the ALGS Championship. Finally, Sony increased the maximum tilt angle from 25 degrees to 35 degrees, which was another request from professional gamers that was addressed.

Sony says that the Inzone M10S II will launch later in 2026 with an MSRP of $1,099. That's a huge chunk of change to spend on a 27-inch QHD monitor, but Sony is targeting a specific segment of the pro-gaming market, and those folks know what they want and are often willing to pay the premium.

Sony Japan has announced that it’s no longer accepting orders for almost its entire lineup of CFexpress and SD memory cards as of March 27, citing a “global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors” and anticipating that supply won’t meet demand “for the foreseeable future.” The announcement, made on Sony’s Japanese product information page, covers orders from both authorized dealers and consumers at the Sony Store and has no stated end date.

The suspension includes Sony's CFexpress Type A cards in 240GB, 480GB, 960GB, and 1,920GB capacities, as well as CFexpress Type B cards in 240GB and 480GB sizes. Sony's full range of high-end SDXC/SDHC cards is also affected, including the 64GB, 128GB, and 256GB TOUGH-branded models and the standard SF-M and SF-E series cards in capacities from 64GB to 512GB.

Only two product lines appear to have escaped the order freeze: the 960GB CFexpress Type B card and the entry-level SF-UZ series SD cards, according to PetaPixel. However, the SF-UZ cards are UHS-I models that have already been discontinued in the U.S. outside of a small number of remaining retailers. Existing stock on shelves may still be available until it sells through, but Sony is not fulfilling new orders.

Sony didn’t specify which component suppliers are constrained or provide a timeline for resumption. "We will consider it while monitoring the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page," the company said. The fact that Sony has paused all orders rather than quoting extended lead times or backorders suggests that it’s struggling to source NAND flash, supplies of which have been smashed by the ongoing memory shortage driven by AI data center demand.

In February, TrendForce revised its Q1 2026 DRAM contract price forecast upward to a 90-95% quarter-over-quarter increase, with NAND flash up 55-60% over the same period, and Phison’s CEO has warned that NAND shortages could shut down entire consumer electronics companies this year. Now, Sony’s hardly going to be forced to shutter its operations due to a lack of NAND, but all this is illustrative that even the bigger players aren’t immune to memory market volatility. Currently, the suspension only applies to Japan.

Sony is the first major company to halt memory card orders outright rather than simply raising prices or extending lead times. The move coincided with Sony's announcement of worldwide PS5 price increases by as much as $100 on the same day. The higher U.S. prices, effective from April 2, will put the standard PS5 at $649.99, up from $549.99.

Sony's lower-end V30-rated 64GB and 128GB SD cards are also included in the order suspension, so it’s clear that the shortage is affecting all tiers of NAND flash production, not just the high-performance segments consumed by enterprise and AI workloads.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of Cox Communications after Sony Music Entertainment and several other labels sued the company for copyright infringement back in 2018. The internet service provider (ISP) actually lost the case back then after the music labels said that the company did not terminate its subscribers despite being repeatedly flagged for downloading and sharing pirated music. This ended with the jury awarding the plaintiffs $1 billion in statutory damages, although this was overturned on appeal, according to Engadget.

“Countless people use the Internet for legal activities, but some use it to illegally share copyrighted works, such as songs and movies…In this case, however, instead of suing those infringers, the copyright owners sued petitioners, Cox Communications, Inc., and its subsidiary, who provided the internet connections that the infringers used,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the decision. “Under our precedents, a company is not liable as a copyright infringer for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will used by some to infringe copyrights.”

This ruling sets a precedent, saying that ISPs are not liable for the actions of their users. Although Cox has a clause in its service contract that prohibits users from distributing pirated content, it seems that quite a few of its six million subscribers ignore it. A Supreme Court of the United States document [PDF] showed that MarkMonitor, a firm that tracks the illegal uploading and downloading of pirated media, sent the ISP 163,148 notices that identified infringing IP addresses over a two-year period. But, out of its nearly 6 million subscribers, Sony says that the company only terminated 32 subscribers for their alleged illegal activities.

The court says that Cox has no contributory liability to the copyright infringement cases that Sony brought against it, as it needed to prove that the ISP either “affirmatively induced the infringement” or that it “sold a service tailored to infringement.” Furthermore, the court pointed out that “Internet service providers like Cox have limited knowledge about how their services are used; they know which IP address corresponds to which subscriber account but cannot distinguish individual users or directly control how services are used.”

TechTuber Epictronics has shared a video documenting his attempts to fix a vintage 20-inch Trinitron CRT monitor suffering from cataracts by injecting UV resin. Spoiler alert: the exploration of a syringe, heat, UV, and patience-requiring method of fixing this old Apple-branded Sony monitor ended up being “a mega-successful repair.” Indeed, under normal lighting/magnification, as evidenced by before and after photos, the unsightly air pockets appear to have vanished.

We’d have to agree that spending time fixing a sample of the legendary Apple GDM‑20E01 is time well spent. Introduced in the mid-1990s, this was a premium, expansive, color display from the era, coveted by creatives (and others who saw it). It used a Sony Trinitron tube and supported resolutions up to 1,280 x 1,024 pixels.

This particular sample has maybe had a harder life than some. The TechTuber says it was actually “trash-picked… very smelly” and filled with spiders when he acquired it. Picking it out of a dumpster could put your back out, though. The GDM‑20E01 tips the scales at approximately 66 pounds (30kg).

“A very nasty cataract issue.”

Epictronics notes that cataracts are a much more prevalent issue in monitors from the 70s, but we’ve already mentioned that Epictronics’ sample was rescued from the trash. This monitor, and many like it, have a thin layer of glass bonded to the CRT tube face. Unfortunately, the protective layer can delaminate over time, which isn’t good for the viewer, with lighter patches often creeping in from the edges, progressing after numerous heat and cold cycles, aging, and weathering take their toll on the bonding adhesive.

Pondering over the scale of the problem for this GDM‑20E01, Epictronics says that while a traditional fix might involve using a heat gun to completely remove the front laminated layer, it is a “risky process than can go wrong, horribly wrong.” So, for this Trinitron, with cataracts still only creeping in from the sides, a less dramatic fix was going to be tested. The TechTuber decided to use a syringe plus clear UV-curable resin to determine if the unsightly air gaps could be flooded. Anyways, Epictronics insisted that this smaller-scale fix won’t hinder a fuller solution at a later date.

After finishing injecting the major air-gap/bubble-affected region in the video and replacing the screen bezel, the TechTuber said, “That was a mega-successful repair.” From start to finish, his technique progressed, settling on a periodic syringe needle-heating technique so the resin flowed readily into the gaps. Magnified close-ups show the cured resin still contained very small air bubbles, but they weren’t observable by the naked eye from a normal sitting distance. The image gallery showing before and after pics pretty much confirms the success of the CRT fixing project.

After the monitor section, Epictronics shifted his attention to the restoration of a contemporaneous Macintosh PowerPC 6100 base unit. The computer had several problems, like a faulty optical drive, among its issues. A DOS compatibility card with a 486 DX2-66 processor was also lined up to expand the capabilities of the pioneering PowerPC architecture machine.

Warning: CRT electronics can remain dangerous, even after the device has been powered off for some time.

U.S. gaming retailer GameStop has “officially” declared that the Sony PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and Nintendo Wii U are, “for all practical purposes, now officially retro consoles.” This new classification, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, references the consoles’ age, lack of Fortnite, and their use of component cables as justification.

This isn’t just a joke, however. The change in policy means that gamers are now free to trade in these old timers, even if they’re defective or “aesthetically unfortunate,” as long as they power on. These consoles will likely go on sale in larger stores that cater to displaying old school consoles and games, as well as via its website, with GameStop also referencing other “beloved legacy hardware” like the Sega Saturn and Nintendo DS on its list.

The company shared its message in a letter shared on its social media channels. In the message, GameStop also confirmed that from now until March 21, anyone who trades in a Wii U, Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, or any other retro console, game, or accessory will gain an extra 10% in trade credit on the transaction.

While confirming that these consoles are “still very cool” and that anyone who owned one at launch is “absolutely not old,” which is a relief to this writer, who happens to be among them, it’s not a huge surprise to see GameStop do this. Both the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 launched in 2005 and 2006, respectively, and while the Wii U launched in 2012, that console has also been long superseded by the Nintendo Switch and Switch 2. All three consoles are products of a different era, and modern gaming has simply moved on.

Of course, a retro console isn’t the only way to play games from this era. PlayStation 3 emulation has long been possible, although tricky to optimize, while emulators for the Xbox 360 and Wii U have also grown in strength and quality over the years. However, the best option remains, in many cases, to run these games on their native consoles —as long as they still work, that is.

Old or not, there’s likely to be a significant number of still-working PS3, Xbox 360, and Wii U consoles out there ready for a second life, and it looks like GameStop is preparing to support the transition. You can view GameStop's full list of retro consoles, games, and accessories over at GameStop’s Retro website.

Panasonic is struggling to keep up with orders for its flagship Blu-ray recorder system in Japan. Supplies of its DMR-ZR1 Blu-ray Disc recorder are so hard to come by that the firm felt it was necessary to make an official statement and publicly apologize for the shortage (from our understanding of a machine translation). As the ‘last supplier standing’ in the market, it is probably safe to say that Panasonic is now enjoying being the sole beneficiary of what will likely be a dead cat bounce.

The Panasonic news bulletin is titled “Notice and apology regarding the supply of ‘4K DIGA ZR1’ products." In the ensuing blurb, it states that “We have received far more orders than we expected for the Blu-ray Disc recorder DMR-ZR1." Fair enough. However, folks aren’t just asked to wait patiently; Panasonic promises it will “strengthen our production system.” It later clarifies (according to our translation) that it “will increase production and make every effort to deliver products as soon as possible.”

We’d hope that the pledges to strengthen and increase production don’t mean further capital investment by Panasonic. Hopefully, it can find ways to ramp up the number of units produced using the equipment it already has – augmented with more, longer shifts by operators, perhaps. Or it could divert capacity from less popular Blu-ray devices in its lineup. Investing in more new, specialized Blu-ray production machinery would not seem wise in support of this sadly dying format.

The Panasonic DMR-ZR1 isn’t a freshly released product, as it was introduced back in 2022. But it is a flagship recorder, with Panasonic referring to it as the "highest grade in the history of DIGA." Official product pages boast of the unit’s construction quality, inside and out, with extensive dampening and insulating structures you should expect in a premium piece of AV equipment. Moreover, inside, Panasonic says there are four independent internal segments for minimal noise and interference between the PSU, Blu-ray mechanism, HDD, and motherboard.

The flagship quality delivered by the Panasonic DMR-ZR1 doesn’t come cheap, though, with the device listed on the firm's home page at JPY363,730, which is roughly $2,300 at today’s exchange rate.

Sony recently exited the Blu-ray recorders market in Japan

Panasonic’s statement about struggling to keep up with Blu-ray TV recorder demand in Japan comes hot on the heels of Sony’s exit from the same market. Another big name participant in the Blu-ray market, LG, even withdrew its players a year earlier.

With Sony and LG effectively ceding the market to Panasonic, this last supplier standing has some breathing room. It is currently faced with more orders than it can handle, but we can’t see this being sustainable in the long term.

Nevertheless, it seems like Panasonic had a unique position of strength in this market, as searches suggest it has been the major component supplier to rivals that have now bowed out of domestic Blu-ray TV recorder supply. Enthusiast forums/chat suggest that both Sony and LG were paying for Panasonic optical drive mechanisms and SoCs/firmware before they exited. So Panasonic benefits, and probably survives, due to its superior vertical integration.

U.S.-based readers who would like access to a Blu-ray recorder, player (and more), for their PCs can still grab devices like the Buffalo MediaStation 6X Portable Type-C USB 3.2 (Gen 1) Blu-ray Drive/External from Amazon. This drive is currently on sale (9% off) for $99.

The memory and storage chip shortage that has been causing RAM, SSD, and GPU prices to skyrocket is now starting to affect other products. Valve has recently announced that Steam Deck availability is now intermittent due to the current situation, and Bloomberg now reports that Sony and Nintendo are considering taking drastic actions, too.

“Sony Group Corp. is now considering pushing back the debut of its next PlayStation console to 2028 or even 2029, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. That would be a major upset to a carefully orchestrated strategy to sustain user engagement between hardware generations,” the publication said. “Close rival Nintendo Co., which contributed to the surplus demand in 2025 after its new Switch 2 console drove storage card purchases, is also contemplating raising the price of that device in 2026, people familiar with its plans said.”

While both companies do not disclose how they manage component orders, they likely have long-term agreements in place with various memory chip suppliers to help keep their costs predictable. But because of the continued massive demand from data centers and AI hyperscalers, chip manufacturers like Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix have reduced their output for consumer memory, resulting in higher prices in the spot market and when customers sign new contracts.

If the reports are accurate, Sony and Nintendo are applying differing strategies to deal with the situation. Nintendo is willing to increase the price of the Switch 2 to offset the increased memory and storage costs, especially as it is selling the new console at slim profit margins. The company has done this before with the original Nintendo Switch, which had its price increased by $30 to $50 in response to economic pressures.

On the other hand, Sony’s rumored tactic would be to delay the next-generation PlayStation for more favorable pricing. We’re unsure how long the memory chip shortage will last, with some estimates pointing out that it could go on for as long as a decade. Nevertheless, some believe that the memory chip fabs would’ve caught up with the demand by 2028 or 2029, meaning prices would’ve stabilized by then, even if they do not return to pre-shortage levels.

The news of chip shortages has been circulating among PC enthusiasts since the last quarter of 2025, but it seems that that is just the beginning. Gaming consoles and handhelds are now feeling the pinch, with mobile phones expected to follow suit. Even cars will be hit by the shortage, especially as nearly every modern feature found in automobiles requires DRAM and NAND.

Another rampart of the consumer optical media market has crumbled away. This week, Sony Corporation has drawn a line under its Blu-ray disk recorder business. Kyodo News reports that the final Sony-branded Blu-ray recorders will be shipped this month. Importantly, this unfortunate news will have few repercussions outside of the niche Japanese market, where these devices are hooked up in living rooms to record broadcast TV. Sony will continue to ship Blu-ray players “for the time being,” notes the source.

This news doesn’t catch anyone by surprise. Sony stopped manufacturing the recorders, as well as recordable discs, this time last year, so the operation has just been running on fumes. Moreover, the Sony recorders that are seeing the last shipments this month uniquely target the Japanese domestic TV recording market.

Kyodo says that this particular recording market has finally been “snuffed out” due to the rise of streaming services. We’d guess other broadcast recording tech like HDD recorders will also have contributed to this product segment's demise.

Blu-ray players, movies, PC drives, and media are sticking around

If you are a Blu-ray media enthusiast, there is still no end in sight, though. Sony and others will continue to address the Blu-ray player market. Moreover, the Blu-ray media (movies, TV shows, etc) market appears to be niche but pretty stable. There’s no need to rush out, just yet, to get a backup player for when the manufacturing of the Blu-ray optical mechanisms ceases.

Blu-ray media users among HTPC enthusiasts shouldn’t be too concerned about Sony’s set-top recorder box withdrawal. Firms like Asus, LG, and Pioneer still seem to be making drives available in internal and external USB models. Blu-ray media is also still being produced by brands like Panasonic and Verbatim.

The Blu-ray optical drive/media format recently enjoyed its 20^th birthday. It was first announced for consumers at CES 2006, where it was enthusiastically supported by the majority of the big movie studios. That was just one year ahead of Netflix (founded in 1997) debuting its online streaming platform. In 2026, Netflix’s best quality UHD video streams run at around 16 Mbps, and are still therefore easily outgunned by the up to 100 Mbps video available to Blu-ray aficionados.

20 years ago today, the CES in Las Vegas was buzzing with talk of Blu-ray technology, players, and media. Several years in the making, Blu-rays arrived with considerable industry backing, with “seven out of the eight major movie studios announced movie titles for the launch,” reports Blu-ray.com. This successor to the DVD offered improved density and thus capacity vs earlier optical formats, largely thanks to the development of blue‑violet laser diodes – hence the name.

Blu-ray discs boosted single layer media capacity to 25GB, vs 4.7GB for DVDs, using a new 405nm blue‑violet laser combined with more advanced materials. The shorter wavelength enabled a higher numerical aperture for more pits per sq mm. This was complemented by a tighter track pitch and a thinner (but harder) protection layer to boost capacity tenfold (comparing single-layer media).

Moreover, Blu-ray’s base speed was significantly boosted, with the older DVD standard offering 11 Mbps, but the new format raising the bar to 36 Mbps. Better quality video was also delivered thanks to Blu-ray’s adoption of the AVC (H.264) codec. It retained MPEG-2 compatibility, but AVC facilitated more efficient HD video file playback at manageable bitrates.

The Blu-ray vs HD DVD format war

Blu-ray’s success wasn’t inevitable, as a rival faction of electronics companies and movie studios would ignite a high‑profile format war. Much like the VHS vs Betamax videotape format war, there could only be one winner, and Sony was on the winning side this time, being one of the biggest backers of Blu-ray. Console gamers of the late noughties became well aware of this format war, as it would also divide the PlayStation and Xbox camps.

Blu-ray's superior capacity, default console integration, copy protection, and broader studio support would mean that this format war was quite brief, with Toshiba conceding in early 2008.

Blu-rays today

Since its introduction, Blu-ray has been iterated and improved with 4K Blu-ray packing HEVC, HDR and more features into the format starting about a decade ago.

Its bitrates are still considerably better than the best mainstream streaming quality available, so it remains a cherished format among home cinema enthusiasts. Thus, Blu-ray media still clings onto some relevance in 2026, with collectors and bandwidth‑limited regions keeping the format alive. It is also still available as the physical media distribution format for some modern consoles.

Its days look numbered, though, if we look at various industry trends. Console makers are pulling away from physical media, including Blu-ray distribution, for example. Also, we saw news of Sony ending recordable Blu-ray production in 2025, and LG ending production of Blu-ray players in late 2024. Changes like this put several sturdy nails in this optical disc format’s coffin.

It seems like an age since PCs last came with Blu-ray (or any optical) disc apparatus built-in. That excludes Japan, for some reason, where we recently noticed optical drive demand surged (inc Blu-ray compatible) coinciding with the end of support for Windows 10.

We frequently report on new data storage solutions, some using optical media. It will be interesting to see if we ever get another wave of consumer optical storage hardware using this kind of physical media.

The PlayStation 5’s ROM keys have allegedly been leaked, meaning anyone who can get their hands on the hex strings now has the hardware code that will allow jailbreakers to try decrypting and analyzing the console’s bootloader. According to The Cybersec Guru, this is an unpatchable problem for Sony, because these keys cannot be changed and are burned directly in the APU. The only way that the company can invalidate the leaked codes is to replace the chips on yet-to-be-manufactured units, meaning consoles that are already in the wild could possibly take advantage of future jailbreaks stemming from the use of these leaked codes.

When you turn on the PS5, its CPU runs the BootROM code that’s baked in the chip and uses the ROM keys to ensure that Bootloader is valid. Now that the ROM keys have been leaked (and assuming they are valid), a hacker could then decrypt and study the official bootloader and potentially use that as a starting point to understand how the PS5’s boot system works. Since the issue is at a hardware level, Sony would not be able to release an update that will stop consoles with the compromised chip from loading kernel-level exploits in the future, should one become available.

Note that this leak does not automatically mean that we will see jailbroken PS5s on the market right now, especially as Sony has other security measures that hackers need to bypass. However, the appearance of these codes means that one of the biggest security features of the console has likely already been compromised, making it easier for those working on creating custom firmware to have a deeper understanding of how the console works and use that knowledge to maybe build a modified (or even a totally different) operating system for it.

This isn’t the first time that Sony has had to deal with a security crisis with the popular PlayStation family. The PlayStation 3 was previously hit with a vulnerability when the company made a mistake with their cryptography on the console, allowing users to install homebrew software and allow piracy and cheating on popular titles. We also saw this with the Nintendo Switch, when a flaw in the Nvidia Tegra X1 chip that it used let tinkerers run Linux on the handheld.

Sony has yet to release a statement regarding the hack, but the company could release revised hardware in the near future to rectify the situation. Another solution is to issue a recall for all existing PlayStation 5 consoles on the market and replace their motherboard to change the hardware codes, but this is unlikely to happen as it’s either going to be too costly for the company or gamers would be unwilling to pay extra for a mistake that was ultimately not theirs.

The original PlayStation wasn’t built to be particularly compact, but later revisions like the PS One managed to get pretty small, while retaining CD media compatibility. However, console hacker Thedrew has managed to condense that already dinky PS One revision motherboard down to less than a quarter of its prior size. This custom PlayStation motherboard is the smallest ever made, according to Hackster, and perfectly timed to celebrate today's 31st anniversary of the console's release.

Thedrew’s creation is an “Original hardware for the win” design. Sure, it could have gone much smaller if the project had been propped up by an FPGA, a modern SoC with an emulator, or some similar electronic/software concoction. This is the real deal, though, with original PS One rev PM-41 chip packages onboard. In other words, it uses Sony’s original CPU, GPU, SPU, RAM, and BIOS chips.

With these components in hand, Thedrew designed the most compact supporting motherboard his skills and resources would allow. The current working model is a quarter size of the PS One mobo, says the console hacker in the above video. Actually, Rev.1 of the compacted mobo measured just 73 x 59mm. That gives us the following rough comparison:

• Original PlayStation motherboard – about 10 x 7-inches
• PS One motherboard – about 7.5 x 5.5-inches
• Thedrew’s PS One redesign – less than 3 x 2.5-inches

Now that the custom PlayStation motherboard is ready and working, we eagerly await the next steps from Thedrew. Towards the end of the video, he says, “now we have a working prototype, let’s make it even better.” This work should find its way into a range of projects under the umbrella term of “The PS One Redesign Series.”

The original PlayStation's anniversary

31 years ago today, Sony released its first blockbuster games console to the unsuspecting public. Commonly abbreviated as the PS, PSX, or PS1, this affordable box of wonders sparked the immersive 3D gaming home console revolution. The PS One (year 2000) was a significantly smaller footprint console that played the same first-gen games.

In 1994. Sony's $299 TV-connected gaming system clearly outshone most contemporary PCs in 3D prowess. Remember, it wasn’t until late 1996 that the legendary 3dfx Voodoo appeared on the scene to bring new levels of 3D realism to PC gaming. Coincidentally, the Voodoo would also cost $299 at launch. You'll have to pay a lot more to buy the best PC gaming graphics card in 2025.

About this time last year, we reported on the new-improved grooved heatsink design that was discovered under the PlayStation 5 Pro’s cooling apparatus. Now these same improvements have reportedly dripped down to the mainstream. Specifically, the same style of heatsink has been spotted in the latest revision of the PS5 Slim.

Click 'See more' to reveal Modyfikator89's image gallery and further replies.

Console modder and fixer Modyfikator89 on X appears to have been the first to spot this revision by Sony, sharing some images to verify his observations.

The console enthusiast reckons this “silent upgrade” from Sony is “the MOST important hardware update of the year.” Moreover, he goes on to remark that this is an early upgrade to the PS5 Slim cooling system, modeled on the Pro’s, and one which represents “a GIANT step for console longevity and stability.”

Benefits of the change for ‘standard’ PS5 buyers will be threefold, reckons the PS5 hardware expert. In addition to better thermals and thus system stability, the new consoles starting with model CFI-2116 should be “free from the metal leak issue that affected older PS5 FAT/ OG and Slim CFI2016 from 2023,” comments Modyfikator89.

In our earlier coverage of a very similar-looking heatsink design, which debuted last year, we noted that the machined grooves were expected to reduce the chance of heatsink dry spots and oxidation. That’s an occurrence which seemed all too familiar to expert repairers like TronicsFix. Indeed, it became part of PS5 lore that vertical standing PS5 consoles would inevitably suffer a liquid metal leak. Sony's feedback from the Pro rollout must have signalled this leaky issue had been tamed. But since this is a "silent upgrade," we might never know the stats behind the engineering change.

Modyfikator89 seems rather pleased with the heatsink upgrade, declaring that it represents a “huge engineering victory,” and that the new Slim is “the most stable PS5 you can buy right now.” It is certainly good to see these small refinements continue, as the PS5’s successor is probably still three to four years away. As such, some would say this generation is still in its prime – especially with launch issues, and niggles ironed out, and the game library and system affordability being better than ever.

Sony continues to expand its presence in the PC gaming market. Following the announcement of its PlayStation speakers just a month ago, the company has now unveiled the PlayStation 27-inch gaming monitor, which features specifications that rival the best computer monitors. Crucially, however, it doesn't support 4K, and Sony hasn't told us how much it'll cost yet when it launches next year.

It has been some time since the last PlayStation-branded display was introduced. The previous model was the PlayStation 3D Display, launched in 2011, which was essentially a 24-inch 3D HDTV. The display introduced by Sony today marks the debut of the first official PlayStation-branded gaming monitor (although the company has released gaming monitors compatible with PlayStation, such as the Inzone M9).

The PlayStation gaming monitor features a 27-inch IPS LCD panel with a QHD (2560 x 1440) resolution. This choice is somewhat surprising for Sony, considering that the PlayStation 5 or PlayStation 5 Pro supports resolutions up to 4K (3840 x 2160). It is logical to note that the IPS LCD is inferior in quality compared to mini-LED or OLED screen panels. Sony may have selected a traditional LCD panel with a lower resolution to save costs.

The gaming monitor comes with an impressive refresh rate of up to 240 Hz. However, PlayStation console users will only experience up to 120 Hz, as Sony's latest console does not support 240 Hz. For the latter, it is necessary to connect the PlayStation 27 gaming monitor to a standard computer or Mac.

The refresh rate may perplex many people, given that Sony would enable up to 240 Hz when neither of its current gaming consoles can output that refresh rate. It is plausible that Sony is over-engineering the PlayStation gaming monitor to accommodate its upcoming next-generation PlayStation 6 console, which is expected to feature significant technological enhancements in both hardware and software, particularly from AMD. Consequently, it is conceivable that the PlayStation 6 could support refresh rates up to 240 Hz. However, it remains premature to draw definitive conclusions, especially given that today marks the fifth anniversary of the PlayStation 5, which positions the current console at the midpoint of its lifecycle. It is unlikely that a successor will be released before 2027 or possibly 2028.

VRR support is implemented, ensuring a seamless and smooth gaming experience across any device connected to the PlayStation gaming monitor. Whilst HDR support is available, Sony has not specified the particular version. Additionally, you can equip the monitor with an optional DualSense charging hook for charging DualSense or DualSense Edge wireless controllers. This hook features a retractable design and is positioned beneath the monitor. Sony has not yet announced the pricing for this accessory.

The PlayStation gaming monitor boasts a comprehensive range of connectivity options. It features two HDMI 2.1 ports and a single DisplayPort 1.4 output, all of which support 2560 x 1440 at 240 Hz. Additionally, Sony has incorporated two USB Type-A ports and one USB Type-C port to facilitate connections to PlayStation Link adapters and various other devices. The manufacturer has not specified the data transfer speeds of these USB ports.

The gaming monitor includes integrated stereo speakers and a standard 3.5mm audio port for headphone connectivity. It is suitable for placement on a desk or mounting via a monitor arm, as it supports VESA mounting; however, Sony did not specify the mount size.

Sony did not disclose the pricing for the PlayStation gaming monitor. The Sony 27-inch Inzone M3 gaming monitor, which features specifications similar to those of the PlayStation gaming monitor but with a lower resolution (1920 x 1080), retails at $529.99; thus, this amount should serve as the ceiling for the PlayStation gaming monitor. For comparison, the Acer Nitro XV270U Z1bmiiprx, which offers comparable features but a higher refresh rate (up to 270 Hz), ranges in price from $209.99 to $249.99. Sony will need to position the PlayStation gaming monitor at a highly competitive price point, even if its pricing strategy solely relies on the PlayStation brand.

The PlayStation gaming monitor is scheduled for release in 2026 in the United States and Japanese markets. Sony advises its customers to remain alert for further updates on the launch date and availability in the coming months.

The creator of the Tiny PS5, Not From Concentrate, has announced a new initiative, the Tiny PS5 Redux. In its most recent installment, which offers guidance on reducing the size of your PlayStation 5, the YouTube channel has supplied a comprehensive tutorial, including a parts list and 3D-printable files, available for $10, enabling you to replicate the Tiny PS5 Redux.

The Tiny PS5 Redux is comparatively less extravagant than the water-cooled PS5 Slim from several years prior, yet it is more practical. Nonetheless, the project is still a challenging undertaking due to the significant time and financial resources required. Beyond repurposing the PlayStation 5's existing hardware, it is necessary to procure additional components, such as a CPU air cooler, cooling fans, and a FlexATX power supply. This project is exclusively compatible with the CFI-1215A and CFI-1215B models of the PlayStation 5. Nevertheless, one advantage of 3D printing is that you can modify the design to accommodate other revisions of the PlayStation 5.

The project fundamentally converts the PlayStation 5 into a portable mini-PC, featuring a high-quality exterior with a premium aluminum body and a Cerakote finish. Cerakote, a ceramic-based coating, is frequently utilized in firearms for its protective properties against corrosion and impacts. Although it increases the overall project cost, it is an excellent choice for safeguarding the exterior of the Tiny PS5 Redux, particularly when it is frequently transported between locations.

As its name suggests, the primary goal of the Tiny PS5 Redux is to reduce the PlayStation 5's size so it's easier to carry around. The device has a volume of six liters, which is 19% more compact than the PlayStation 5 Slim and up to 43% smaller than the original PlayStation 5.

The Tiny PS5 Redux is not only more portable but also incorporates several enhancements, including improved heat dissipation and wireless connectivity. The PlayStation 5's PCB is positioned between two custom-printed heat sink plates. Additionally, a low-profile Alpenföhn Black Ridge CPU cooler, equipped with two slim 120mm Noctua Chromax fans, maintains optimal thermal performance for the custom AMD 6nm Obreron SoC. Cool air enters the device through the rear, while three 60mm Noctua fans expel hot air through the side panel.

The original antennas on the PlayStation 5 are located within the Tiny PS5 Redux, but they connect to a pair of external antennas to enhance connectivity. Due to spatial constraints, an M.2 extension cable links to a 3D-printed M.2 bracket, facilitating the use of the best PS5 SSDs with M.2 2280 support and a maximum capacity of up to 8TB. A 500W GaN power supply powers the Tiny PS5 Redux to ensure sufficient electrical provision.

According to the modder's benchmark results, the Tiny PS5 Redux pulled around 220W in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 with temperatures up to 50 degrees Celsius. It ran cooler and drew less power than the creator's original Tiny PS5 project (220 to 225W and 56 degrees Celsius) and a stock PlayStation 5 (230 to 235W and 59 degrees Celsius).

We are approaching the PlayStation 5's fifth anniversary in just one week. Although Sony has introduced numerous special, game-themed editions of the PlayStation 5, including the PlayStation 5 30th Anniversary Edition, the Tiny PS5 Redux is definitely in a class of its own. It's a great way to give your PlayStation 5 a distinctive makeover, provided you have the funds and access to the right equipment.

Sony took the wraps off its Pulse Elevate wireless speakers during its State of Play event a few hours ago. With this 2.0 speaker system, the firm says it will be introducing its “first wireless speakers for desktop gaming.” Obviously, Sony has a long legacy of wired speakers for PCs, dating back to its VAIO multimedia PC days.

The new PC, Mac, and PS5-compatible Sony Pulse Elevate speakers use PlayStation Link wireless connectivity, which promises lossless audio with ultra-low latency. Other key features are the inclusion of a microphone with AI noise cancellation, an easy-access volume knob, and battery power for portability.

This launch will expand the Pulse audio family, which Sony already established with the Pulse Elite wireless headset and Pulse Explore wireless earbuds.

In terms of audio performance, a technology highlight of the Pulse Elevate speakers is the use of Planar magnetic speaker drivers. In each speaker, these are situated above woofers, which extend the bass response so you can “feel every impact” when gaming.

Different platforms, different speaker features

Tempest 3D AudioTech is supported on the PS5 platform, in compatible titles, for positioning audio. Both PS5 and PC have software controls that allow for adjustments of the speaker EQ, sidetone volume, and mic mute settings. It seems like Mac users will miss out on this extra configurability.

The speakers are easy to position and detach from their charging docks, upon which they sit on your desk. The PlayStation Link USB-C wireless dongle and associated software are also said to make it easy to switch input sources. That may be welcome if you have multiple systems sharing a desk space, for example.

We also note that the Pulse Elevate works with the PlayStation Portal Remote Player, if you are one of the ~2 million people who own one of these handhelds. The design offers “simultaneous Bluetooth and PlayStation Link connectivity.” And thanks to Bluetooth, you will also be able to pair them with your smartphone.

Wait until next year for availability and pricing

The rumors (via billbil-kun) regarding Sony's revision of the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition have been confirmed through various overseas Amazon listings. Although the new CFI-2116 revision maintains the original pricing, Sony has decreased the internal storage from 1TB to 825GB, representing a 17.5% reduction in capacity. This change further emphasizes the importance for owners to upgrade their consoles with one of the best PS5 SSDs.

The PlayStation 5 has been on the market for nearly five years, during which time the console has undergone multiple hardware revisions. These modifications have varied from minor optimizations, such as improvements in heatsink design, to substantial hardware alterations, including a die shrink, culminating in the transition to the PlayStation 5 Slim models. Consequently, the most recent CFI-2116 revision feels like a regression.

The original PlayStation 5, colloquially referred to now as the PlayStation 5 Fat, was equipped with 825GB of internal storage, of which approximately 650GB was accessible to the user, depending on system updates and other variables. The shift to the PlayStation 5 Slim introduced numerous enhancements, including an increase to 1TB of storage, providing the user with approximately 850GB of available space (subject to similar factors).

The CFI-2116 revision, also known as "Chassis E," marks the return of the 825GB SSD, which Sony advertises on the new packaging. Consumers are losing close to 200GB, or 24%, of usable, high-speed storage with the latest revision. You could argue that 200GB isn't a lot, and that's true in a way since some AAA titles — specifically, Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War — are pushing over 300GB of installed size. But under normal circumstances, 200GB should be enough for one or two games.

Today marks 43 years since the first commercial Compact Disc (CD) pressing. Polygram in Germany is credited with pressing the first copies of Abba's The Visitors on this date, back in 1982. The CD format would take off in a direction which would have been highly unexpected at the time, ending up as a foundation of the Multimedia PC age. However, CDs didn’t kill the audiophile thirst for vinyl, and, on the flip side, some artists are still releasing CDs, even in the 5G and fiber digital streaming age.

While the first commercial CDs were factory pressed some 43 years ago, the discs were in development for quite some time ahead of this date. According to various sources, Sony and Philips clubbed together in 1979 to create a digital music disc.

Beethoven’s influence?

Among the first prototype CDs, a format with an 11.5cm diameter which was capable of storing an hour of music was an early front-runner. Philips apparently had a production line ready for such silver coasters. However, the final 12cm diameter and 74 minutes capacity was apparently favored as it was sufficient for a complete recording of Beethoven's 9th Symphony - Sony president Norio Ohga’s favorite musical opus.

We must note that there are conflicting 74m CD audio origin stories, though. Another credits the desire for this particular uninterrupted audio duration to famed conductor Herbert von Karajan. Similarly, the Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 recording of Beethoven's 9^th (74 minutes long) is said to be the reason for this time target.

By June 1980, the CD audio Red Book standard was finalized. Abba’s The Visitors entered production in Aug 1982, though wouldn’t hit retail on its new fangled format until March 1983. Meanwhile, the first CD album released in the U.S. is thought to be Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., released in September 1984.

According to Statista, CD album sales peaked in the year 2000, with around 943 million sold in the U.S., alone. The format’s fall from grace has been pretty fast since then, but things have recovered a little since the 2020 low.

Computers and optical media

For computing enthusiasts, like us, the announcement of the CD Yellow Book standard is probably more important than the audio standard. This new standard, which would reach the market in 1985, added binary data to CD storage.

Yet another significant change came in 1988, however. In this year, the ISO 9660 standard came into being, defining a file structure for CD-ROMs. CD burners, which created another huge ripple in the PC pond, began to first become available to the public in 1992. But it would take until the latter half of the 90s, when pricing, interfaces, and software began to democratize CDs as digital storage, archiving, and sharing essentials for everyone.

Reading about people using CDs with computers in 2025, as almost as archaic sounding as the use of floppy disks. Nevertheless, some music fans still prefer physical CDs to digital platforms (and the vinyl) such desires have probably spurred the likes of Taylor Swift to release almost 20 physical variations of her latest release, The Tortured Poets Department – including CDs, LPs, and even cassettes. If you count digital variants, there are 36 editions of this album you could buy.

Italian content creator Francesco Salicini, who owns the YouTube channel Once Were Nerd, says he is currently under investigation by Italian authorities for allegedly promoting piracy by “advertising” Anbernic game consoles. Anbernic is known for its retro handheld gaming consoles that can emulate classic titles from Nintendo and Sony. However, the company often ships its products with microSD cards that contain hundreds of copyrighted ROMs. This is definitely against the law and a form of piracy, but Salicini claims that he only reviewed the hardware and that no manufacturer sponsored his videos. He even went further and refrained from adding affiliate links to his content.

Salicini is currently accused of violating Article 171 ter of the Italian Copyright Law, which metes out a maximum penalty of €15,000 (around US$17,000) and three years' jail time. At the moment, his case is still under investigation, with the Italian Guardia di Finanza (Financial Police) seizing more than 30 consoles, including those from Anbernic, TrimUI, and Powkiddy. The police also hold the creator’s phone, as well as the transcripts of his conversations with these gaming handheld makers.

The initial investigation takes about six months, after which the authorities will have to decide whether to drop the case or to go forward with the criminal proceedings. But in the meantime, Salicini also runs the risk of having his channels taken down even without definitive proof that he’s in the wrong.

Nintendo is known to be extremely protective of its intellectual property and is known to serve copyright strikes against YouTubers who emulate its games on their channels. The company has also taken down thousands of Yuzu emulator repos on GitHub and successfully shut down Ryujinx. At the moment, we don’t know who filed the case against Salicini, but if Nintendo or Sony (or both) is behind this, then they’re taking things up a notch with this potential case.

There’s currently a tug-of-war between game studios and game preservation enthusiasts on the legality of emulators. On the one hand, developers and studios want to have total and complete control over all their titles, even those that have been published almost 50 years ago. But as the hardware designed to run these games is slowly dying out and keeping them running on current-gen consoles might not be profitable for developers, the only way we can enjoy these is through the use of emulators — or else we risk losing these games forever.

Today marks the release of the Nintendo Switch 2, but if Nintendo consoles and games aren't to your tastes, how about getting your hands on the current most powerful games console on the market? Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro is the current console king with its mid-life refresh. Everything has been upgraded, from the graphical power to the base amount of available storage. Unfortunately, the price was also upgraded, so it's nice to see a discount on Sony's latest console.

Available at Amazon, you can pick up the Sony PlayStation 5 Pro for just £636. This is a tasty discount from the £699 list price and almost matches the all-time lowest price seen for the PlayStation 5 Pro of £635. This offer is for the console and a single DualSense controller. The console is a "digital-only" version, but you can upgrade with a separate disk-drive addon like in this bundle deal from John Lewis, where the PlayStation 5 Pro, DualSense controller, and Digital disk drive are on offer for £709.

The PlayStation 5 Pro is the refreshed version of the PS5, sporting more storage (2TB) as standard, and using new PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution or PSSR tech to upgrade and enhance image quality and framerates of PlayStation games from the PS5 and PS4 era. The PS5 Pro even has upgraded tech for ray tracing capabilities, for more immersive lighting effects in your games.

As I briefly touched upon, this deal only includes the console tower and a controller. If you want to upgrade the PlayStation 5 Pro tower to include a disk drive, you need to purchase a separate Sony PlayStation 5 Disk Drive like this one from Very for £69, reduced from £100. This will allow you to play PlayStation 5 games from physical disk media, where you might be able to pick up games cheaper second-hand, or use collectors' edition disks.

The export tariffs enacted in April are expected to raise retail prices by 11% to 70% across different categories, cut consumer spending by $123 billion annually, and shrink U.S. economic output by $69 billion, according to a report by Trade Partnership Worldwide (TPW), published by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA) on Wednesday.

There are a couple of catches: the report, which evaluates how recent U.S. tariffs will affect prices of 10 widely used technology products in the U.S., assumes that all tariffs will come into effect, and that there will be full pass through to retail buyers.

On April 2, the Trump administration introduced a tariff program under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that included a 10% general rate on all imports and increased rates for 57 countries by between 11% and 50%. A 10% universal tariff went into effect on April 5, while higher rates were applied to specific countries starting April 9.

A pause was placed on the elevated country-specific tariffs on April 10, though the baseline 10% tariff remained. On April 11, electronics and semiconductor-based products were temporarily spared from these new tariffs, but a Section 232 probe into the broader electronics supply chain launched on April 16 brought renewed tariff risks, with early 25% duties already applied to materials such as aluminum and steel, as well as vehicles. Perhaps most importantly, tariffs on goods from China (except electronics) surged to 145%.

The TPW study modeled a scenario where the 90-day hold on tariffs ends in July, and higher rates resume on affected goods. Products not complying with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA) trade rules would face stacking tariffs (i.e., up to 50%), whereas Chinese goods could be hit with combined rates of 145%. The analysis covered batteries, client PCs (desktops and laptops), displays, game consoles, tablets, TVs, headphones, and various computer accessories.

Game consoles and PCs

Game consoles face the steepest projected increase, with average tariffs climbing from 0% to 130%. Because 87% of these devices come from China, which would be subjected to a 145% rate, prices could rise by as much as 69%, or $428 more per unit, the report says. As a result, imports could fall 71%, and domestic production, which makes up only 1% of the market, would rise by just 62%. Consumers are expected to cut back purchases by 73%, resulting in a $12 billion drop in their overall purchasing power. The U.S. economy would lose $10.4 billion annually from this single category alone.

Laptops and tablets are projected to become 34% more expensive. For now, these items are exempt from country specific tariffs, but they could still be taxed under the Section 232 review. Nearly 79% of laptops and tablets are made in China and for now there are no manufacturing capacity in the U.S. to replace gigantic assembly facilities in China.

As a result, TPW expects average price hikes of up to $269 for laptops and $152 for tablets. Imports would decline 47%, while domestic output would increase only 5%. The result would be a $23.8 billion annual loss in consumer spending power and a $12.3 billion reduction in GDP.

Desktop computers are largely sourced from Mexico and other countries rather than China, but they would face a price hike from 0.3% to 42.3% because of tariffs. With limited U.S. production capacity (under 9% growth expected), prices could increase by 24%, adding about $287 to the average retail cost of $1,193. Imports are forecast to drop 53%, and consumption by 42%. The result would be a $13 billion loss for consumers and a $5.1 billion hit to GDP.

TPW did not conduct a research on how tariffs affect computer components. For now, these items are exempt from country specific tariffs, but they could still be taxed under the Section 232 review. However, if graphics cards and motherboards continue to be sourced from China and are not exempt from tariffs at some point, they are are subject to combined U.S. tariffs reaching up to 145% or more — similar to those applied to other China-made tech products such as game consoles and computer accessories. This could raise the retail price of a $500 graphics card to over $1,200 and a $200 motherboard to nearly $500 — assuming full cost pass-through. Given China's dominant role in assembling these components, short-term diversification of supply is limited, meaning most of the tariff burden will fall directly on U.S. consumers. As a result, PC builders and gamers would face significantly higher costs, potentially delaying upgrades or reducing demand across the DIY computing sector.

Taiwan-made graphics cards and motherboards would also face substantial price increases, though less severe than China-made ones, depending on how tariffs are applied. If they do not qualify for duty-free treatment under the USMCA and are not explicitly exempted, they may face a 25% tariff and a 25% Section 232 tariff (if electronics and semiconductors are included), totaling a potential 50% tariff (as these tariffs stack).

This would increase a $500 graphics card from Taiwan to around $750, and a $200 motherboard to $300, assuming full pass-through. Since Taiwan is a major supplier of high-end motherboards and graphics cards, the impact would still be significant but not as extreme as for Chinese products. U.S. buyers would still see elevated prices, but these goods may become more attractive relative to China-made ones, depending on how the final tariffs end up stacking. But can Taiwan satisfy the needs of the U.S. market?

Displays and TVs

Displays are 67% sourced from China, so they would be hit with average tariffs of 43.3% (10 to 25% on all imports and 45% to 145% Chinese imports, so the average is 43.3%) or more, up from 0.5%, raising prices by 32% or $111 per unit. Imports would fall by 48%, and U.S. production would rise by only 10%. This category alone could lead to $5.1 billion in lost consumer power and a $2.8 billion economic decline.

Unlike computer monitors, TVs are largely sourced from outside of China, but they would still see tariffs increase to 22.4% from 1.6%, raising average prices by 11% — or $57 per unit. Imports would decline by 15%, domestic output would rise only 2%, and the resulting loss in consumer spending power would be $1.9 billion, with a $1.6 billion GDP reduction, according to TPW.

Mobile electronics and accessories

As 78% of smartphones are imported from China, they are projected to face a 39.5% average tariff rate under the combined measures. This could push up consumer prices by about 31%, or $255 more than the current average of $826. The absence of domestic production means alternative supply will be difficult to secure quickly. Imports are projected to drop by 48%, and purchases are expected to fall by the same amount. As a consequence, this shift would erase $31.2 billion in spending power and lead to a $17.9 billion economic loss, TPW believes.

Connected devices, including smart speakers, smart watches, wearables, and Wi-Fi-connected gadgets, would become 22% more expensive, according to the report. While countries like Vietnam have been gradually increasing production of devices such as Apple's AirPods in the recent years, Chinese companies still produce a substantial share of these items. Consequently, TPW says import reductions of 40% are likely, with a 6% increase in U.S. production. Consumers would pay $81 more for smartwatches, $20 more for fitness bands, and $10 more for speakers. Total loss in consumer power would reach $18.3 billion, and economic output would contract by $7.8 billion.

Speakers and headphones, around half of which come from China, would face 86.6% average tariffs, up from 0.9%, raising prices by 22%, according to TPW. Headphones would cost $5 more, speakers $60 more. Imports from China would drop 99.8%, and total imports would shrink by two-thirds. Production in America would grow by 24%, while consumption would fall 39%, yielding a $2.5 billion reduction in consumer power and a $1.5 billion GDP loss.

Computer accessories like keyboards, printers, mice, and docks would see prices rise by 25%, with average tariffs moving from 1.5% to 39.5%, TPW believes. Imports would drop nearly in half, and production in the U.S. would climb by just 12%. Printers could cost $58 more, and the total reduction in consumer buying power is projected at $13.1 billion. The broader economy would contract by $7.6 billion.

Finally, lithium-ion batteries for consumer electronics, most of which come from China, would see tariffs rise from 5.9% to 117.7% — raising prices by nearly 18%. Imports would fall 71%, and local production would grow by 16% at best. Prices would rise up to $16 per unit, causing a $2.4 billion loss in consumer power and a $2.0 billion impact on GDP.

While the tariffs aim to stimulate U.S. manufacturing, the study shows they'll mainly impact consumers, who will face significantly higher prices amid limited domestic production gains to offset them.

The Best PS5 SSDs

Finding the best PS5 SSD can be daunting due to the wide variety of choices. Plenty of SSDs will work in the PS5 and provide a simple and hassle-free capacity upgrade for your game library, but which ones rise above the crowd? To narrow down the options, we've tested many drives in a battery of tests, including many models from our SSD benchmarks hierarchy. From these, we've picked the best SSDs for the PS5 based on performance and price at several different capacities.

Nearly any new drive you buy for the PC can also be used in the PS5, so you'll also find many of these same picks on our list of Best SSDs for desktop PCs. You can also use everything from a tiny M.2 2230 drive up to a longer M.2 22110 model in the PS5, but there's no real benefit from choosing the other form factors. M.2 2280 SSDs are ubiquitous and typically offer the best combination of value, performance, and capacity.

The PS5's internal SSD is a restrictive 825GB (or 1TB on the PS5 Slim), and after formatting, updates, and bloatware, it typically leaves you with about 670GB free for games. That's bad news because today's games are becoming larger with each new release, and you'll also need somewhere to store all the screenshots and video clips you gather while you play. Call of Duty, as an example, can use more than 200GB all by itself!

The good news is that Sony has an M.2 expansion slot where you can put a second SSD for the PS5, and the current system firmware allows you to use SSDs with up to 8TB of capacity. That's hopefully enough storage to satiate even the most demanding of gamers, but there are also far more affordable options, with modern 2TB and 4TB models being particularly attractive choices for the PS5.

The TLDR: Best SSDs for the PS5 (more info below):

Here's the quick list of the best SSDs for the PS5, but we have further breakdowns and testing results below. There are also similar drives in some cases, with effectively the same hardware, and we'll list those alongside our primary selections. When searching for the best SSD for the PS5, you'll want to be careful about which drive you pick. The Samsung 990 Pro and WD SN850X are great SSDs for the PS5, though pricing has been trending upward for the past several months — on all SSDs. The SN850X also comes as an SN850P that's just an overpriced SN850X with a different heatsink and PlayStation 5 branding.

We've broken things down by category, with our top picks being the WD Black SN850X, SK hynix Platinum P41, and Samsung 990 Pro. For capacity or budget minded shoppers, we also have the Acer GM7000, Silicon Power US75, and Netac NV7000. Which drive will fit your particular needs best depends on what you're after, so we list multiple alternatives for most categories and SSDs.

Best SSDs for PS5

WD took its popular Black SN850 SSD and turned it up to 11, but luckily the price isn't nearly so extreme. The current $124 price on Amazon for the 2TB model is a great deal, though other capacities may not be as attractively priced. The 4TB drive at $249 is worth a look for those who want more capacity; the 8TB drive at $549 is also worth a thought if you really want all the capacity you can pack into that M.2 slot — and it's now $300 off the original launch price.

The Black SN850X leverages an improved controller and newer flash to get the most out of the PCIe 4.0 interface, thus delivering excellent performance with the Sony PlayStation 5. Performance is improved across the board, and the drive comes with a heatsink option at all capacities. You'd be better served by a purpose-built PS5 heatsink, however.

WD also supports the SSD with a respectable five-year warranty that will let you game with peace of mind. It's a great match for the PlayStation 5, and while it can be a bit pricier than budget options, overall it's still our top pick. It's also fast for gaming on a PC, particularly with DirectStorage starting to become useful.

WD has taken the course of releasing an officially-licensed SN850P. That drive is a glorified heatsinked SN850X and should only be picked if you really want the PS5 logo on your heatsink for whatever reason. It's far less expensive to get a bare SN850X and add your own heatsink.

Read: WD Black SN850X Review, WD Black SN850X 8TB Review

The Samsung 990 Pro was not our original pick for the best PS5 SSD alternate option, but the drive has grown on us over time. Samsung experienced some firmware issues with the 990 Pro that were eventually resolved, and the manufacturer later introduced a single-sided 4TB SKU with newer flash to enhance the product. This newer flash has trickled back into the smaller SKUs, making the mature version of this drive an excellent all-around pick. That means it’s great for the PlayStation 5 even though it lacks the 8TB option that WD/SanDisk offers with the SN850X/SN850P line.

Samsung also offers the drive with a PS5-compliant heatsink, which means one less worry if you’re running your system hard in a hotter environment. You can also take advantage of Samsung’s software and support if you have a PC available to host the drive. The main downside of the 990 Pro, especially when it’s being used for the console, is that it costs more per GB than many alternatives on the market. If you want a high-quality drive, though, it’s near the top of our list.

Read: Samsung 990 Pro Review

The Biwin NV7400 doesn’t have DRAM, but it does have good performance, good power efficiency, and a good warranty with high TBW. The cost of DRAM has made DRAM-less SSDs more attractive than usual, but some are better than others. The NV7400 should be near the top of the list for PCIe 4.0 choices. It’s available in a range of capacities up to 4TB with a single-sided form factor that’s great for the PS5. It does lack a heatsink, but you could add your own, and the drive is power-efficient enough to be run bare. If you don’t want to go with a slower drive or one with QLC flash, it should be near the top of your list.

Read: Biwin Black Opal NV7400 Review

Alternative Compromise PS5 SSD

Our backup choice for a compromise drive is the WD Black SN7100. We like the NV7400 a little bit more on the whole as it’s more well-rounded in the performance department, but the Black SN7100 has a lot going for it. It has class-leading power efficiency and random read performance, which makes it fantastic for everyday use and for laptops. These two areas are less important for the PS5, though, which means the NV7400 wins on price. That said, we think you should keep the door open for this drive. We would take it over budget options like the Kingston NV3 or QLC-based Blue SN5100, or even higher-end QLC like the P310.

Read: WD Black SN7100 Review

High-Capacity SSD for PS5

If you want the largest possible SSD for your PS5, look no further than the WD Black SN850X 8TB. 16TB drives aren't really a thing in the consumer space, likely because even 8TB drives remain relatively niche parts with a higher price per TB of capacity than 4TB and 2TB drives. But the SN850X online prices have dropped quite a bit since it initially launched with an $849 MSRP.

In our PS5 test suite, the SN850X 8TB was effectively just as fast as any other drive. The PS5 doesn't support PCIe 5.0 speeds and the internal drive ends up being a bottleneck for both the copy to and read from tests that we run. That means you not only get maximum capacity but also maximum performance.

What's not to love? The price. $579 for 8TB isn't terrible, but that's more than a PS5 costs on its own. $649 for the heatsink version is a bit of a joke, since you can put on your own $10–$15 heatsink instead (but without the WD Black branding). It's also a double-sided drive, which means the underside can run a bit hotter if you're doing a bunch of writes — both most writes will be limited by the internet connection so it's not really a concern.

Read: WD Black SN850X 8TB review

The Addlink A93, or the S93 if you don’t need a heatsink, has been one of the most affordable SSDs for the PS5 all the way up to 4TB. It’s DRAM-less, but it has good performance and power efficiency, so it works well in the PS5. The A93 also takes a PS5-compliant heatsink if that’s something you want, although the S93 without the heatsink uses the same hardware. Its main weakness is a lack of DRAM but, but thankfully, that’s not a requirement for use in a PS5.

Other drives we’ve reviewed with this same hardware, like some variants of the TeamGroup MP44, would also fit in this slot as pricing and availability change over time. The Biwin Black Opal NV7400, which has Micron flash with the same controller, is also a good alternative. The A93 stands out here mainly because it is often positioned less expensively and is sometimes overlooked for bigger brands.

Read: Addlink A93 SSD Review

Best Cheap SSD for PS5

Our biggest complaint about the Crucial P310 – both in this and the shorter M.2 2230 form factor – was its high price for what it offered. This has changed as the price of the drive relative to the competition has lowered significantly. Memory and SSD prices are currently in a large upward swing, but Crucial benefits from using its own Micron NAND flash and can position QLC, which is in high demand in the enterprise, more aggressively in the consumer market. This means it’s a good pick for the PS5 right now, as our original entry for this category – that would be the SanDisk WD Black SN7100 – uses TLC flash but has become more expensive.

While we’re all about getting a drive with TLC flash whenever possible, and better yet with DRAM, the PS5 console’s storage requirements are very modest. Almost any Gen 4 drive will do, and, as it so happens, the P310 isn’t at the low end of that segment anyway. It’s one of the best QLC-based drives on the market – only the WD SanDisk Blue SN5100 gives it a real run for its money – and it performs well even without DRAM. The P310 was only available up to 2TB at the time of our review, but now comes in 4TB, which removes another caveat we had. The Blue SN5100 does have higher rated endurance, but we don’t suspect that it is an issue on the PS5.

Read: Crucial P310 (2280) Review

Oh, how the mighty have fallen. We long had the popular TeamGroup MP44L on our list as a good budget SSD for the PS5, but times have changed. With the release of the MP44Q earlier this year, settling for a 5 GB/s drive like the MP44L doesn’t make much sense anymore. Especially as the MP44L is using questionable hardware these days. The MP44Q excels in its role, even with the transition to QLC flash, delivering good performance and power efficiency. More importantly, it’s affordable with a decent capacity range.

There are some caveats, though. The drive does have the typical issue with sustained write performance that QLC flash is known for, but this is not a huge deal with the PS5. The MP44Q may also have to face the superior Crucial P310 and Sandisk WD Blue SN5100 down the road if prices come down. Currently, however, it offers an affordable alternative to the TeamGroup MP44 – which would fill a gap if not for the Sandisk WD Black SN7100 – and has a good price per GB at 1TB and 2TB. The SN7100 currently beats both at 4TB, but on a tighter budget, you can get by with the MP44Q at lower capacities.

Read: TeamGroup MP44Q review

Benchmarks / How We Tested PS5 SSDs

Swipe through the galleries for different capacities

Some of the best SSDs for the PS5 are either specifically designed for the console, or come with an integrated heatsink. However, some drives don't come with a heatsink, so we equip them with the Sabrent M.2 NVMe heatsink for the PS5 to both meet the requirements for the PS5 and to ensure a level playing field. We've found that this cooler is a great solution if you're looking for a cheap, versatile, and easy-to-install solution. There are other similar heatsinks, like the SK hynix Haechi H01 that will work just as well (though apparently neither of those work with the newer PS5 Slim).

The Sony PS5 has an internal benchmark measuring how fast the system can read data from the drive. This is the most critical performance metric for gaming, as a speedy response time is responsible for ensuring a smooth gaming experience. As you can see in the 'PS5 Read Benchmark' column above, the fastest SSD in our test pool was 90% faster than the slowest model. Sony will even flag performance as being potentially inadequate if the read score is below about 4,000 MB/s. However, this read tests only takes a few seconds and basically shows the burst speed of the SSDs, so it's quite synthetic in nature.

Real-world tests show much smaller differences. For instance, our 'Copy to M.2' benchmark consists of timing how long it takes to move four games totaling more than 200 GB (we use Mass Effect: Andromeda, Assassin's Creed Valhalla, Elden Ring, and Astro's Playroom) from the internal PS5 SSD to the expansion drive. In most cases, we only see a difference of a few seconds, and converting to MB/s the difference between the fastest WD Black SN850X and the Solidigm P41 Plus is only 10%. But then there's a pretty big step down to the Samsung 990 Evo and the various Phison E27T-equipped SSDs, followed by the Transcend 250H, and in dead last (for now) sits the Inland TN470 1TB — another Phison E27T drive. How much will this matter in terms of gaming performance? Probably not at all, but when you move a bunch of data from the integrated SSD to the M.2 drive, it will take longer.

On the flipped side, we also tested this process in reverse, moving the four games back to the internal drive for our "Transfer From M.2" benchmark. Here, the sustained write speed (and encryption/security protocols) of the integrated 825GB SSD becomes the limiting factor, and there's only a 5.6% difference between the fastest and slowest SSD we've tested. The current 825GB SSD only appears to write data at up to ~250 MB/s, and all of the M.2 SSDs are easily able to maintain read speeds much higher than that figure.

Likewise, real-world testing (i.e. launching games) has failed to expose meaningful differences between the drives — it's common to see at most a one to two second difference between drives in game load times. Other testing we've seen from multiple outlets indicates very few meaningful differences, if any, for game loading times. Overall, you're unlikely to notice the speed difference between most PCIe 4.0 SSDs and could make a good argument for simply selecting the most cost-effective drive that meets the capacity target that you want — 4TB and 2TB drives are particularly popular.

Naturally, not all of the drives that we test will make the final cut for our list of Best SSDs for the PS5, but that doesn't mean those drives failed the test, or wouldn't be a great deal if you can catch them on sale. The Solidigm P44 Pro is a great SSD that delivered respectable performance in our PS5 SSD benchmarks (it's the same hardware as the SK hynix Platinum P41), and given the slim difference between the fastest and slowest SSDs on our list, it could make a great drive if the price is right. The only thing we'd try to avoid is any SSD that uses QLC NAND, as those drives can slow down significantly as they're filled to capacity.

There's also no real benefit at present to selecting any of the PCIe 5.0 SSDs, as they tend to use more power then PCIe 4.0 drives, making them a poor choice for the PS5. Given current prices there's no real purpose in using a PCIe 5.0 drive for your PlayStation 5, though we've included results from several of the newer models (on the assumption that price differences between PCIe 4.0 and 5.0 drives will shrink over time).

Upgrading Your PS5 Storage

As PlayStation 5 games become larger with every release and Sony moves away from producing physical game discs, it is ever more important to increase your console’s storage with a M.2 NVMe SSD. It is the only way to guarantee you can continue enjoying upcoming titles without running into storage issues. Fortunately, the installation process is very easy and quick, even for those with little to no experience with technology. Here’s a quick summary of our PlayStation 5 SSD installation guide to make your upgrade as smooth as possible:

• Unplug all the cables from your console and put it on a flat surface.
• Remove the outer cover by lifting it from the designated corner.
• Locate the expansion slot cover and remove the screw with a #1 Phillips screwdriver.
• Adjust the spacer inside the expansion slot to match the length of your SSD.
• Insert the SSD in place and use a #1 Phillips screwdriver to secure the screw in place.
• Install an aftermarket heatsink if necessary.
• Reconnect all cables, power on your console, and follow the instructions to format the SSD before use.

Tips for Finding the Best SSD for the PS5

Sony PS5 SSD Requirements

The Sony PS5 requires an M.2 SSD that communicates over the NVMe protocol. Officially, you'll need a PCIe 4.0 x4 model that can deliver up to 5,500 MB/s of sequential read throughput. In practice, you can use slower SSDs, and you'll just get a warning that performance may be inadequate — note that PCIe 3.0 models are explicitly prohibited from working. The console supports 250GB, 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and 8TB models.

These small, rectangular drives look like sticks of RAM, only smaller, and the PS5 accepts both single-sided and double-sided versions. You'll also need to ensure that your drive has a cooling solution pre-applied. These can consist of thin copper heat spreaders that look like a label, or a full-fledged metal heatsink with a thermal pad.

Not all of the best SSDs for the PS5 come with a heatsink, but you can easily use your own double- or single-sided heatsink. We recommend the Sabrent M.2 NVMe heatsink for the PS5, which actually replaces the outside SSD panel on the PS5 with a heatsink, giving the SSD access to nice cooler air from outside the system. We've found that this cooler is a great solution if you're looking for a cheap, versatile, and easy-to-install solution, but there are many options on the market. For instance, TeamGroup has its new TForce AL1 heatsink, which operates similarly, coming to market soon.

Just make sure the SSDs don't exceed 110 x 25 x 11.25mm. M.2 SSDs are usually 80mm long by 22mm wide, described as size 2280, but some may be shorter or longer. The PS5 supports M Key Type 2230, 2242, 2260, 2280 and 22110. Some M.2 drives are also SATA interfaces instead of NVMe, but those are rare and would not be listed as being PCIe 4.0 compliant. Regardless, make sure your SSD supports NVMe.

Sony has detailed instructions on how to install a PS5 SSD. As you can see in the video above, installing the SSD is a simple process that only requires a #1 Phillips head screwdriver. After you've installed the SSD, you can navigate through the menus to the 'Settings→Storage→Installation Location' area and change it to your new SSD. All new games will now install directly to the SSD.

To move existing games to your new drive, select the internal SSD, highlight the item you want to move, press the Options button, and then select 'Move Games and Apps.' Select any other games that you would like to move in the checkboxes, then select 'Move.' As noted in our above testing, moving from the integrated SSD will generally be much faster than moving to the integrated drive.

Verbatim and I-O Data have pledged to continue to support the recordable optical media market. In a press release on Verbatim's Japanese site, the storage brand wrote (machine translation) that it "will respond to the trust of customers through stable supply of optical disks in the Japanese market and continuing sales." It also signaled that this statement had been precipitated by worried customers hearing about the withdrawal of other major manufacturers.

It is evident that Verbatim was stirred into making its reassurances after Sony's recent public withdrawal from the recordable Blu-ray, MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassette markets. Sony will shutter its last Japanese facility where it manufactured these data storage media sometime this month. It had already stopped supplying recordable Blu-rays to consumers last summer, and it has now drawn a line under commercial supplies with the factory closure.

In its press release, Verbatim said that the stable supply of high-quality optical recordables to Japanese customers is "a top priority." It recognizes that the market is now at a major turning point with other suppliers pulling out, but repeated several times that it will continue to provide these once hugely popular optical discs to the Japanese market. This Japanese language PR highlights that particular geographic market, but it does mention the global scale of Verbatim's operations at least once.

Scooting over to the Verbatim North America site, we don't see any news releases that would worry us with regard to recordable optical supplies dwindling. Rather, we see the company proudly declare that it is "the No. 1 Optical Brand in the World." It also maintains a comprehensive ranges of many product lines, so you can buy CD-R discs in five colors, with inkjet labels, or finished to look like vinyl records, for example.

Another encouraging sign for optical disc devotees is that Verbatim has recently launched new optical disc reading/writing hardware. A new Verbatim branded Slimline Blu-ray Writer was showcased at CES 2025, and it is described as "a 4K writer equipped with Ultra HD Blu-ray playback and powered by a USB cable." Pangs of nostalgia were felt when we read that the drive comes bundled with 'Nero' software and is compatible with PC systems packing an "Intel Pentium III / AMD Duron 900 MHz or higher."

Sony has announced it will end its recordable Blu-ray Disc media production in February, marking the end of its nearly two-decade run. This end-of-production announcement also affects MiniDiscs for recording, MD data for recording, and MiniDV cassettes.

The company ended the production of recordable consumer Blu-ray and optical disks in mid-2024, indicating it would retain production lines for business and corporate clients until it became unprofitable. However, as the general public prefers streaming services over physical media, commercial sales have quickly become insufficient to sustain Sony’s optical media business.

The first Blu-ray disc prototype was released in 2000, designed as a successor to the DVD, and competed against Toshiba’s HD DVD. Both Blu-ray and HD DVD became publicly available in 2006. Still, the latter lost out to the former in the format wars because of Sony’s partnership with film studios and the inclusion of Blu-ray technology in the PlayStation 3.

While ODD ownership peters out, many users store important files using cloud storage. However, this usually has a monthly cost and could become prohibitive if you store a large amount of data. Putting your data online also raises a lot of security issues. Some users and organizations prefer storing files on hard drives, which typically come with a lifespan estimated at five years. If you don’t move their contents to a new drive within that time, you risk losing the information within them — something that the music industry is just discovering now.

If stored properly, optical media could be viable for decades, which makes it an ideal medium for long-term cold storage. While Sony is no longer making recordable Blu-ray media, its competitor, Pioneer, has found a niche in long-term storage and created a Blu-ray disc designed to last a hundred years. Other researchers are even working on archival glass storage that should last 5,000 years.

TSMC has commenced mass production at its fab in Kumamoto, Japan, marking a significant milestone in advanced chip manufacturing for the country and the first step in its major expansion overseas, reports Nikkei. The plant, operated by Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), produces chips using a variety of process technologies for TSMC's major customers in Japan, reports DigiTimes.

As TSMC's Kumamoto fab kicks off operations, this marks the first time logic chips featuring FinFET transistors have been made in the Land of the Rising Sun. TSMC's new fab near Kumamoto on Kyushu Island can process up to 55,000 300-mm wafer starts per month (WSPM) using TSMC's 40 nm, 28 nm, 22 nm, 16 nm, and 12 nm-class process technologies. Several variants of N28 are meant to address automotive and mature applications, whereas the 22ULP process aims at ultra-low-power applications. As for N16 and N12 production nodes, they are meant to address the demands of more performance-hungry applications that can take advantage of FinFET transistors.

While 16nm-28nm-class fabrication processes are considered outdated for advanced processors in PCs and smartphones (not to mention AI and HPC applications), they are well-suited for automotive and consumer electronics components, which are in high demand among Japan's large companies. These manufacturing technologies are expected to stay relevant due to the long lifecycle of many chips, which is why TSMC, its partners, and the Japanese government (which provided around $3 billion) have invested around $8.27 billion in JASM. 

Speaking of investors, TSMC is the majority shareholder with an 86.5% stake, followed by Sony Semiconductor Solutions at 6.0%, auto parts maker Denso at 5.5%, and Toyota at 2.0%. 

Plans are underway for a second fab at the Kumamoto site. Construction is expected to begin in the first quarter of 2025, a bit later than expected. That fab will be capable of producing chips on TSMC's 6nm and 7 nm-class process technologies and will begin operations by the end of 2027. The cumulative production capacity of the two facilities is projected to be over 100,000 300-mm wafers per month, and total investments in the site are expected to reach around $20 billion. 

Kimura, the governor of Kyushu Island, has expressed interest in bringing a third TSMC fab to the region (potentially capable of 5nm or even 3nm-class nodes) but acknowledged challenges that include the success of the first two fabs and implementing solutions for traffic congestion and groundwater management. Support from the federal government and local community will also be essential.

For TSMC, its Japanese project is a significant milestone in its expansion beyond China after WaferTech in the early 2000s and Fab 16 in Nanjing, China, in the second half of 2010s. The world's largest contract maker of chips is about to formally kick off mass production of 4nm and 5nm-class chips at its Fab 21 near Phoenix, Arizona, which will mark another milestone in its expansion beyond its home turf in Taiwan. The third step in the company's overseas expansion will be its ESMC facility near Dresden, Germany, which will mostly address automakers with 12nm, 16nm, 22nm, and 28nm-class process technologies.

We've seen some all-in-one Raspberry Pi gaming rigs before but this one definitely takes the cake. Maker and developer ConsciousFish6170 has put a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W inside of a video game controller. Everything you need from the games to the emulation software is contained in one, handheld device. This setup makes it easier than ever to emulate games and keep all of your hardware in one convenient location.

The project is built around a broken Sony PlayStation 4 controller so don't worry— no working controllers were harmed in the making of this project. According to ConsciousFish6170, the controller was big enough to house a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, so it won't be able to play PS3 games like the Raspberry Pi 5 but you can still enjoy quite a bit of emulation for more simple consoles from the NES to the original Sony PlayStation.

It wasn't enough to fit the Pi inside, however, he wanted the controller to look as functional as possible so certain components, like the analog sticks, were left in place. That said, some of the broken hardware had to be removed to make enough room for the Pi and respective cables that allow for external connections and peripherals to be connected.

As we mentioned before, the main board powering the system is a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W which is small enough to fit but also has the added benefit of WiFi support along with low power consumption. It's connected to a couple of USB Type-C mini adapters which lets ConciousFish6170 attach both a USB hub and a power supply.

ConciousFish6170 opted to use RetroPie as the main emulation platform for this project, successfully testing a handful of emulators for consoles like the NES, PlayStation 1 and GameBoy Advance. However, you could totally get away with using other systems as well like Lakka or just plain RetroArch.

If you want to get a closer look at this Raspberry Pi project in action, you can check it out over the project thread shared by ConciousFish6170 to Reddit.

This week, developers behind the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 announced that RPCS3 had now achieved stable, native Arm64 architecture support for Windows, macOS, and Linux platforms— Arm64 architecture support so definitive that it even includes the Raspberry Pi 5, of all devices, utterly pushing the limits of emulation believed possible on the Raspberry Pi 5. In the past, Raspberry Pi 5 has also been seen emulating GameCube and Wii (Wii less effectively) — but with the correct settings adjustments, it seems even PS3 emulation is possible on today's entry-level Arm hardware.

Running PS3 emulation on Raspberry Pi 5 is very much "challenging the limits of PlayStation 3 emulation"— considering the settings used, which make the affair look like a genuine PlayStation Portable (PSP) game by scaling down to the PSP's output resolution of just 273p versus PS3's native 720p. But this makes running some 3D games actually possible, including God of War (and God of War II) HD (originally PS2 games), Catherine, Naruto: Ultimate Ninja Storm, and more. 2D games will be a lot more playable across the board, of course, but even being able to turn around playable framerates in PS3-era 3D titles is well beyond the emulation capabilities most would expect from a Raspberry Pi 5.

Over on the MacOS side of things, native support for Arm architecture versus simply emulating x86 has netted some massive performance gains on Apple Silicon playing PS3 games. Framerates are seeing increases of anywhere from 50-100% just by running natively instead of being forced through x86 translation on top of intensive PS3 hardware emulation, making truly performant Arm-powered PlayStation 3 emulation a reality instead of a far-off dream.

Unlike the Raspberry Pi 5 testing which more or less approximates a PlayStation Portable, the Apple Silicon testing shows off high performance in some true PS3 powerhouses, including the likes of God of War III and Skate 3. These titles are much harder to emulate than PS2-to-PS3 HD ports like God of War HD, but they are still quite playable on Arm architecture hardware, so long as it has the muscle to back the experience.

Sony is working on a portable gaming console that will aim to compete against Nintendo and Microsoft, according to reports. This portable gaming device will allow gamers to play Playstation 5 games irrespective of the location, unlike the PlayStation Portal which is a connected remote play device. However, the standalone device may still be "years away from launch," leaving plenty of time for Sony to change or abandon the project.

Earlier, Microsoft CEO Phil Spencer said that the development of a portable Xbox gaming device would take a few more years, which now seems similar to Sony. Nintendo is a major player in the handheld gaming market, and its next-gen Switch is expected to be released next year.

Sony's spokesperson declined to comment regarding its plans.

In recent years portable gaming has evolved dramatically with Valve's Steam Deck and its newer OLED version making big waves. This encouraged others to step into the market- namely Asus, Lenovo Legion, Logitech, MSI, and many more. The major benefits both Microsoft and Sony have are their wide collection of games in their libraries and the ability to attract more IPs and developers for their platforms- either exclusive or cross-platform - by indie and AAA studios.

Making a portable device to work with the PlayStation 5's games will take time as it will need suitable hardware and specially optimized firmware. Since this project is still in its initial design phase, it remains a distinct possibility that Sony may change the design goal or abandon it completely.

The State of Portable Gaming- Then Vs. Now

Sony is familiar with the portable gaming market, as it released the original PlayStation Portable, PSP Vita, and PSP GO years ago. According to Bloomberg's earlier report, the PlayStation Portal was meant to be a standalone device, but the company ended up opting for a remote gaming device with an 8-inch screen that wirelessly streams games from the user's PlayStation 5 via WiFi.

Irrespective of its success with the PSP in the past, Sony has many competitors now. Sony will also be competing with cloud gaming services that are device agnostic - led by Nvidia with GeForce Now and Microsoft's Xbox cloud gaming offerings.

There are major benefits to going portable, as it opens its offerings to a wider audience base who may not play games on either PC, cloud, or console. If Sony decides against marketing a new portable, it is going to be the only gaming platform not to enter the handheld gaming market.

Save state functionality has been part of the emulation scene for many years but it seems that it may make the move to consoles. A recent patent made by Sony outlines a future version of the PlayStation controller with a dedicated Save State button, per a legal document spotted on PatentScope by the folks at Tech4Gamers. An exact quote from the document states, "The user is able to enter the rewind mode from the live game play using one or more controller inputs to view recent game play (e.g. rewinding, fast-forwarding, playing, etc.) and returning to live game play afterwards." Keep in mind that not all patents become real products.

To users of various emulators, this descriptor of a "rewind mode" recalls the save and load state functionality common to those applications. Even Nintendo Switch Online's retro games support save states and brief rewind windows, these days. Instead of setting this functionality to a key bind like on PC emulators or a custom button combination like on Switch, though, Sony is looking to implement a dedicated button for this specific functionality, likely within immediate proximity to the D-Pad.

Outside of official and unofficial emulators, there are some other uses of save states in gaming— and not just regular old save files. One of the most interesting examples of this has to be Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, a 2003 action adventure game originally released for PlayStation 2, Xbox, and Nintendo GameCube in November 2003. That game's titular sands of time mechanic allowed players to reverse time to undo unfortunate deaths to the game's many enemies and environmental hazards, quite similar to how system-level save state functionality often allows users to rewind death or other mistakes in emulators.

Of course, it's worth noting that such a button like this, even implemented system-level, simply will not work with all games. For example, multiplayer titles that rely on synchronizing game states between players, servers, or both won't allow for functionality like this. A dedicated button like this would only be usable in single-player games, and some fans may even argue it would taint those experiences— particularly Soulsborne fans and their devotion to a static difficulty.

The launch of Sony's PlayStation 5 Pro is imminent, set to arrive in four days (on November 7) to the tune of $699 USD. At this price point, Sony is promising massively improved resolution and framerate through the use of AI upscaling with PlayStation Spectral Super Resolution (PSSR), and a souped-up CPU and GPU compared to the base PlayStation 5 released back in November 2020. Considering the absence of a similar upgrade from Microsoft's Xbox brand, it seems the high-end console gaming throne has truly been ceded to Sony — and an apparent teardown of the new strongest console appeared on YouTube just last night.

The video teardown of the PlayStation 5 Pro ahead of its street release date seems to be from a Portuguese console repair shop, with the process revealing an internal layout quite similar to the PlayStation 5 Slim model. Other sources have noted that these similarities would make PlayStation 5 Slim faceplates compatible with the Pro were the interlocking mechanisms not seemingly changed specifically to prevent that functionality, so this teardown also seems legitimate.

Aside from some noted similarities to the PS5 Pro, there isn't too much else immediately notable about this PlayStation 5 teardown unless you specifically wish to see the internals. You can't exactly gauge the way these internals will perform based on a teardown, though, since you'll just be left looking at circuit boards instead of numbers that could establish some expectations. For those, we'll be looking to a Twitter post that's also been drawing lots of press attention this week.

This supposed PlayStation 5 Pro specifications leak was posted yesterday afternoon on Twitter by user @videotechuk_, previously known for posting Rockstar Games leaks. This leak mostly includes information we already knew or expected, including that PlayStation 5 Pro will still be using the same Zen 2 architecture that its immediate PlayStation 5 predecessor is using. Sticking with Zen 2 is likely a conscious choice for strict compatibility with the base PlayStation 5, though some prior reports have mentioned the PS5 Pro could potentially support boosted clocks compared to the base.

What sticks out most about this purported specifications leak is that the PS5 Pro GPU is now slated to perform at an expected 16.7 teraflops and have a full 16GB of dedicated GDDR6 VRAM, not having to share it with CPU like on base PlayStation 5 models. Rumors also indicate the PlayStation 5 Pro will have 2GB of DDR5 RAM dedicated system memory. This marks quite a departure from previous PS5 models with unified memory.

Four years on from the original November 2020 release date of PlayStation 5, it's clear that gamers are more eager than ever to get their hands on the new PlayStation Pro console, even though it's Sony's second mid-generation "Pro" upgrade. If Xbox won't be doing it and you are unwilling to engage with PC gaming, the PlayStation 5 Pro still makes sense, and early benchmarking of its improvements in PSSR image quality and support for real-time ray tracing graphics look promising.