The Major Problem with Taking Screenshots on the Playstation 5

In nearly every way, the Dualsense is a welcome and hearty upgrade to the beloved Dualshock 4 controller from Sony. But there remains a glaring flaw to the Playstation 5’s (PS5) controller that I wouldn’t notice until I was deep into playthroughs of Spider-Man: Miles Morales and Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade: the screenshot function on the Dualsense, which is incredibly frustrating to use. The screenshot function on the Dualsense is a not only a botched solution to the problems that permeated the Playstation 4’s capture features but is in many ways a step backwards for anyone interested in capturing their own screenshots. It needs addressing.

I pride myself on capturing compelling and relevant screenshots to accompany my written articles. I often take around 50 screenshots over the course of a meaty AAA game, which can wildly fluctuate based on the tone, setting, atmosphere, and other varying aspects of the experience. Some games have led me to capture literally hundreds of screenshots, and those are always the most fun to sort through when writing an article about a game I’ve finished. So between the F12 key in my Steam library and the Share button on the Dualshock 4, I’ve become something of an amateur game photographer just by sheer volume. I think of these screenshots as vitally important to the articles that I write, and that mentality has led to a more liberal approach to exercising the screenshot button, becoming a central feature of how I play games.

First Impressions with the Dualsense

Fast forward through the eight months I spent trying to track down a retailer who had a PS5 in stock long enough for me to throw my money at them, and the Midnight Black Dualsense arrived at my doorstep about a month before the actual console. I started using the Dualsense on PC, sorting my way through a few additional hours of Death Stranding and then my entire playthrough of Cyberpunk 2077. The Dualshock 4 controller was heretofore my favorite choice of gaming hardware, so this was a tough act to beat. And even though the support for the Dualsense is middling thus far on Steam, at least the majority of its features are already recognized by the program.

One of the major features that remains unsupported with this next-gen controller on PC and thus is fundamentally different to the native Dualsense experience on console is the lack of the Share button (renamed the “Create” button for the PS5 generation) support for screenshotting. At various intervals in my time with the Dualsense, I still found myself leaning forward to press the F12 key before returning to normal gameplay. 

I didn’t expect the Dualsense’s Create button to be well-supported in general on PC, as the Dualshock 4 is treated quite similarly when synced, but I did expect that I’d feel a next-gen experience once I hooked up my Dualsense to the actual Playstation 5 console. There was such a hullabaloo about the Playstation 5’s next-gen features, which extended to new capture methods, leading up to getting my hands on one. But when I first queued up my thumb to press the Create button during my playthrough of Miles Morales, I was immediately faced with a hideous black bar at the bottom of my screen instead of the resultant screenshot I expected. I learned at that moment, as the cutscene continued to play, that you had to take the additional action of pressing the X button to confirm your screenshot. Thereby, I missed the pivotal screenshot I was hoping to save for a future article, and I’d have to replay that cutscene from the beginning to have a second chance at the photo — a far from ideal situation.

The Create Button’s Sins with Obtrusive Overlay

One of the things that is truly condemnable about the PS5’s screenshot interfacing is that ugly black bar at the bottom. It takes up about a fourth of the screen and I haven’t found a solution to move or render it opaque. Even worse, as most games place their subtitles at the bottom of the screen (I cannot recall playing a video game with the subtitles turned off in my adulthood), this black bar completely interrupts my ability to easily follow along with what’s happening in the story. So not only was I surprised at this extra step with the Dualsense’s screenshot function, but the UI involved ruins what’s happening on screen entirely — whereas the Dualshock 4’s controller simply made a camera clicking sound, displayed a confirmation symbol in the top left of the screen that your screenshot had been taken, and you could continue uninterrupted. 

The Dualshock 4’s screenshotting button had its own major problem. Namely, when you would take two or more screenshots in quick succession — which is a completely normal thing to do during a high intensity cutscene — the screenshot symbol from your previous capture would appear in the subsequent image, tainting it like a watermark. There’s also the issue of certain stingy publishers requiring a gross amount of legal information about the game in the bottom right of screen captures (looking at you, Square Enix). But that’s an unfortunate aspect of game publishing rather than a problem with the Dualshock 4 itself. Either way, if you wanted to take quick screenshots on the Dualshock 4, you were out of luck. Bewilderingly, this issue was not accounted for nor resolved on the Dualsense.

Not only does the Dualsense commit the same sin as its predecessor, it also feels like the Dualsense screenshotting feature was designed as though you would never try to take a screenshot during a moving frame or cutscene. Because of the extra button press after hitting Create, you couldn’t easily take a screenshot during an intense combat encounter, for example. And because of the aforementioned black bar, you might actually miss what you’re trying to capture in the first place. But these aspects alone are not the source of my lamentation, only the set dressing for the Dualsense’s Create button’s worst feature: the delay.

Can You Work Around the Dualsense’s Screenshots?

Because I found this contrived black bar process of screenshotting so infuriating, I dug into forum threads to see if there were PS5 settings I had overlooked or if there were alternative methods to screen capturing on this console. The immediate answer I found was to hold the Dualsense’s Create button, which if you do a long-press of a few seconds, you will receive a screenshot notification that’s quite similar to the Dualshock 4 notification I described above. You can simply grab your screenshot and move on, as long as you can anticipate what you want to capture about three seconds in advance — which is just a glaring flaw that I cannot believe more people aren’t up in arms about. (And remember, you can’t rapidly use this method or else your game photos will all be marked with the PS5’s screenshot symbol in the top right of each image.)

And in the actual Playstation 5’s settings, you can swap between two basic functionalities of pressing and holding the Create button, inverting the role described above. But that’s not a solution, just an alternative button map. If you keep digging around in the menus, you’ll also be able to adjust the length of the press and hold delay for this button, but I did not experience any improvements when loading back into my PS5 games to capture another screenshot. I am glad that these accessibility settings exist, but they were not what I was seeking.

It’s not that the Dualsense’s actual Create button feels wrong to use, as it’s largely the same as how the Dualshock 4 presented its own Share button. Instead, it’s the fact that basically every method of capturing screenshots on the Dualsense forces you to miss what you truly want to capture. When I’m playing the next-gen version of Final Fantasy 7 Remake, for example, the camera angles often don’t linger for more than about three or four seconds before cutting to something else, as it’s typically a very dynamic game from a cinematographic standpoint. As a result of such a quickly cutting camera, I often press (or hold) the Create button on my Dualsense, only to pull my hair out later when I scroll through the Playstation 5’s Capture Gallery and realize that everyone’s face is blurry or the shot changed, etc. 

Input Lag and Delay When Screenshotting on PS5

Continuing with the Final Fantasy 7 Remake example, I often claim that this game has several visual flaws but features the most beautiful character models I have ever seen. FF7R is up there with the best this industry has to offer for character rendering and animations on its lead cast, especially the playable protagonists. Naturally, I have wanted to take dozens of screenshots of Cloud wielding his Buster Sword in a way that reflects light from the city, or Tifa and Aerith being total girlbosses and high fiving, or Barret narrowly escaping an explosion from a massive building. Easily three-fourths of these screenshots have missed the mark, even with my now anticipatory sense of needing to take screenshots ahead of time. 

When I take screenshots with my Dualsense controller, I feel like I’m experiencing the kind of input lag that makes Steam’s Remote Play Together co-op feature feel unusable for games like Cuphead which require quick reaction times. You have to somehow know what you’re going to do before it happens on screen, and I think that expectation for the user is unfair and ridiculous. If Sony wants its Playstation 5 users to proudly share their most gorgeous screenshots on Twitter, which, let’s be honest, is free marketing for their games, then I find it staggering that they haven’t addressed the practically broken screenshot function on their otherwise standard-setting new Dualsense controller. 

Patchwork Solutions for PS5 Screenshots

There are patchwork solutions to my problem with the Dualsense like recording your playthrough and pausing the playback to take screenshots after the fact. But when you play and write about as many games as I do, the idea of going back to watch the thing you did for a second time just feels like a redundant and archaic prospect. Even if I embraced this clumsy workaround, Sony has changed the interface between console generations that would previously allow quick, fine-tuned editing control during playback, so it’s a compromise rather than a solution.

Obviously Sony is nowhere near done updating and altering features to the Playstation 5’s software and user interface, but when I scroll through forums and gaming websites, I don’t see much fuss being made on this issue regarding the screenshot function. And that is discouraging given how persistently annoying this problem has been in my month of owning a Playstation 5. 

Will Sony Fix This Basic Issue?

This is all to say that, if my Playstation 5 screenshots aren’t as well-timed or crisp as you’ve come to expect from articles that I’ve written about Steam or Playstation 4 games (hell, even the Switch has an instantaneous screenshot button that works like a charm!), then you can lay those criticisms at the Dualsense. It’s a shame to spend all this money on new hardware and games only to realize belatedly that I’m going to need to develop a new screenshotting system when playing games on the next generation of console. It’s an unacceptable design oversight.

If, and hopefully when, Sony fixes this issue with the Dualsense’s screenshotting function on the Create button, I will return to singing its praises. Because otherwise, I think the Dualsense has the potential to be the best controller in gaming history so far. I just don’t want shiny new attributes like haptic feedback and adaptive triggers to distract me from something that is just as fundamental to my gaming experience: the screenshot button. 

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