It’s been a long time coming, but the PlayStation 5 is finally available to the market at large.

Sales numbers show the PlayStation 5 continues to gain steam with consumers, introducing many to what Sony has to offer. Many of those buyers are returning and loyal customers while others, like myself, are newcomers to Sony products.

While the PlayStation 5 houses plenty of fun, there’s a lot of technical aspects that may go over people’s heads if you’re not used to Sony consoles. Even long-time PlayStation users may find a lot to process in the settings menu.

That is why Boss Rush decided to breakdown the settings menu of the PlayStation 5 and give you a tutorial on what each menu offers. You can access the settings menu via the gear symbol in the upper-right corner of the home screen. It’ll be next to your profile icon.

This guide is intended to be a general overview and not a deep look at all the settings. No one likes sifting through menus to find what they want so hopefully this guide can help you get to where you need to go quickly.

Guide and Tips, Health and Safety, and Other Information

This menu is pretty straight forward. It includes digital copies of forms that typically come with a new console. In this case, those forms include the User’s Guide, Health and Safety guide, and Legal Information. You can also discover additional tips on using your PlayStation 5.

Accessibility

Your accessibility tab features a lot of settings surrounding your display, sound, colors, and other features that some may need for an optimal gaming experience.

• Display and Sound: Click here for zoom; inverting colors; color correction; text size; bolding text; text and background contrasts; showing a tick on enabled settings; auto-scroll speed; and reducing motions.
• Screen Reader: Turn on and off your screen reader from this setting. This also includes various settings for the screen reader such as speech speed, voice type, and voice volume.
• Controllers: Set up custom button assignments here.
• Closed Captions: Enable closed captions on the screen along with further closed caption settings.
• Chat Transcriptions: This allows you to convert voice chats during parties and games into transcriptions. It will also read aloud to other players any voice text you enter.

Network

This is a fairly straightforward menu where you can connect to your wireless or wired Internet connection. It also is where you can connect into your PlayStation Network account.

Users can test their connection status and get all the necessary information, including download and upload speeds.

Users and Accounts

This menu allows users to set up both their personal and family accounts as well as privacy settings

• Account: Allows you to update our account information including change email address, set security settings, edit your publicly played profile including profile name and picture, manage payment and subscription information, change your address, and change your communication preferences.
• Privacy: Adjust privacy settings for both you and your console as well as manage how your data is collected and used.
• Link With Other Services: Manage your linked accounts to outside services such as Twitch, Discord, and others.
• Family: Set up accounts within your family and manage your family settings.
• Other: Manage console sharing and offline play as well as restoring licenses. Sign out from your account here as well.
• Login Settings: Determine how you log into your PlayStation 5 including passcode settings.
• Delete User: Remove users from your PlayStation 5.

Family and Parental Controls

This menu allows you to manage PlayStation 5 restrictions as well as other family settings. Within the family settings, you can set rating restrictions as well as limits on PlayStation VR and web browsing. You can also set up a console restriction passcode here.

There are some cool parent settings in this menu including setting spending limits; restricting playtime; and other personalized approaches to child accounts.

System

This is where you’ll go for general settings on your PlayStation 5 as a whole.

• System Software: Refer here for your console information, error reporting and history, system and system feature updates, backup and restore, data transfer, and reset options.
• HDMI: This menu allows you enable HDMI Device Link. If that is enabled, you can choose to enable One-Touch Play and Power Off Link. You can also enable High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection or HDCP, which is a digital copy protection that prevents the copying of data as it travels through a connection.
• Language: Choose your console’s language as well as the input language.
• Date and Time: Set your date and time as well as the format and time zone. You can also set your console to update automatically for Daylight Savings Time.
• Remote Play: Set up Remote Play including linking a device. It also provides your connection history.
• Power Saving: Set up power saving options including time limit before turning off controllers or putting the console into rest mode. You can also control your rest mode settings here.
• Web Browser: Specific web browser settings including allowing and deleting cookies, enabling JavaScript, clearing website data, and preventing cross-site tracking.

Storage

This is where you manage your console’s storage including the console itself and any USB extensions. It can also show you your storage breakdown including what software you have on your console.

This is also where you go to delete any games or media. It’s also where you mange your save data and your cloud storage. You can also set up where software goes for installation.

Sound

You can go to this menu to manage our audio input and output settings.

• Microphone: All your microphone settings are here including setup for specific microphones. You can also control settings such as input levels and the microphone’s status at different points of your play session. The default microphone is the one in your controller.
• Audio Output: Settings surrounding the type of audio output you have connected. This includes specific settings for headphones and AV Amplifiers. Also include general settings including enabling home screen music, sound effects, and priority audio formats.
• 3D Audio for TV Speakers: Manage the 3D audio settings for your TV speakers. This includes measuring room acoustics, applying those measurements, and comparing different sounds.
• 3D Audio for Headphones: Setup 3D audio for your headphones and compare it to standard stereo sound.
• Volume: Control volume for headphones and the controller.

Screen and Video

This menu is mainly adjusting any video output settings. Video output settings address resolution, refresh rates, enabling 120 Hz output, audio low latency mode settings, 4K transfer rate, and High Dynamic Range and other color settings.

You can also use screen settings to adjust your display area and allow the console to dim the screen when you’re inactive for a certain amount of time.

Accessories

This menu allows you to manage your connected accessories such as controllers, media remotes, and others.

• General: Come here to manage Bluetooth accessories and to turn accessories off. Advanced settings allow you to turn off your console’s Bluetooth capabilities.
• Controller (general): This is where you’ll handle your controllers settings including vibration intensity, trigger effect intensity, brightness, and many others. You can also update your controller’s software here.
• Media Remote: Media Remote settings including setup are here.
• Other Accessories: Allows for setup of keyboards, mouse, and cameras.

Saved Data and Game/App Settings

You can manage your save data here including your data on both your cloud and console. You can also upload and download any save data to/from the cloud from here.

Game/App Settings allow you to manage your features for individual games and other apps you download.

• Game Presets: This allows you to set up specific settings for games ahead of time so you don’t need to set them up each time. You can address difficulty, performance or resolution modes, first-person and third-person view settings, and subtitles and audio.
• Automatic Updates: Set up automatic downloads and updates here including auto-install during rest mode.
• Spoiler Warnings: Allows you to have the console warn you about potential spoilers in content on the console such as the news section.
• Game Status: Allows you to sync your game data to your PlayStation Network automatically.
• Followed Games: Manage the information you receive from games you followed on the PlayStation Store and elsewhere. Games usually post updates so if you’ve followed a game, those updates will jump up your feed.

Voice Command (Preview)

This is another accessibility feature for the PlayStation 5. You can come here to enable voice commands as well as other features such as speech speed, speech volume, and response timeout. You can also tell your console to listen for the phrase “Hey PlayStation!” as well as participating in feedback on the feature.

This feature appears to be a work in progress as it is only available in the U.S. and U.K in English.

Notifications

You can manage your notifications here including pop-up notifications. This menu also allows you to handle the play sound and display time.

Additionally, you can manage what kind of notifications you receive such as friends online and trophy notifications. There’s a long list of potential notifications so this setting really allows you to customize your experience.

Captures and Broadcasts

This menu allows you to manage your captures, broadcasts, and auto-captures.

• Captures: Come here to manage screenshot formats, video formats, and enabling auto-upload. You can also manage shortcuts for create buttons such as button mapping for easy captures.
• Broadcasts: Manage your broadcast settings including video quality, audio, camera, overlays, and chat to speech.
• Auto-Captures: Manage your auto-captures here including when the console automatically captures a moment from your game. These tend to happen around trophy achievement and many of the settings center on trophies.

Featured Image: Triyansh Gill (via Unsplash)

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