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Sony Is Teh Suxorz!
Just saw this on digg. An online store in the UK has started taking orders for the PS3. Their asking price?
$1020 equivelent!
Check it Peeps
$1020 equivelent!
Check it Peeps
Comments
EDIT: Another thing; Other Blu-Ray players on the market will cost US$1000. This one is cheaper and plays games.
First off, how useful are blue-ray or hd-dvd going to be? When the PS2 came out as a DVD player DVD had already been accepted as the VHS replacement. Right now, people are very happy with DVD, and it will be years before either of the HD formats are widely accepted.
Secondly, the PS2 was a god awful DVD player. Why would you think that the PS3 would be a good blu-ray player? TVs with built-in VHS and DVD players suck. DVD players built into game systems suck. Barely anybody used their playstation as a CD player, with good reason.
Lastly. If blu-ray ever does replace DVD the players won't be $1000 anymore. The players have to go down in price to $100 or less for the technology to succeed in the market. Buying either a PS3 OR a blu-ray player right now is a bad deal. It would be like if you bought an Xbox 360 to be a dvd player, bad deal.
There are people who buy electronics to use them. There are also people who buy electronics because they think other people will be impressed with the fact they own expensive gadgets. Nowadays Sony seems to be mainly targetting the latter group, not the former. I think they are in for a rude awakening when they realize that there aren't that many idiots out there. Sure, there are a lot, but not enough.
That being said... Sony sucks.
Using AUD here, sorry;
50 DVDs cost me $18. 4.7 *50 = 235 GB
A 250 GB Drive is $108 (IDE), far SATA, just add 50 dollars.
$18
HD-DVD's and Blu-ray both are capable of 1080p resolution.
Almost nobody can play them in that resolution. EVEN HDTV OWNERS.
Many HDTV owners bought their sets 3-4 years ago. They only support 720p (or worse, 720i). They're totally SOL.
Most HDTV owners who purchase within the last 2 years support 1080i. Actually, that's worse than 720p for most applications. (If you want to know more, search for either term on wikipedia and read for about 20 minutes on interlacing and digital television).
Why? Simply because neither component video nor (ordinary, i.e. the majority of ) DVI connectors can handle 1080p resolution. Only HDMI can do it (and one weird variant of DVI that nobody has), and HDMI is horribly, horribly DRM encumbered.
And they already want to replace HDMI with an even MORE horribly DRM encumbered connector. (Refer to the episode discussing DisplayPort). This will invalidate even the newest, most expensive HDTV's sold the day before it comes out, which is not even scheduled yet.
By the way, most people don't even support component or dvi cables and don't even know what they are. So they are MORE than three generations behind, as Sony would have you believe.
And where are you supposed to get HDTV programming?
Many digital cable networks offer free or low-cost HDTV over their existing cables. You get the big networks plus a couple channels (inHD) and HBOHD if you have HBO. Okay, fine. It's in 1080i. But actually...it's very, very compressed, just like all internet video! It's so compressed, you might as well be watching a DVD! It looks no worse than a DVD, but a DVD is in 480p resolution! And NORMAL color TV's support that!
Of course, you can also get terrestial HDTV broadcasts. All major cities are broadcasting HDTV in 1080i alongside the standard definition broadcasts. What you get: major networks, certain local networks. No Comedy Central, no HBO. (The former is still not available in HD anyway).
So HD-DVD and Blu-ray are the only way to actually get HD content that isn't on one of the major networks (for the antenna-based-television impaired, that's ABC, NBC, PBS, and Fox, and maybe some others here and there).
But consider this:
If you buy the world's best HDTV today, it supports 1080p. Great. That's, what, 2.25 times better than 480p? Then you buy a Blu-ray DVD player. And a movie.
$5000 (ballpark) + $1500 for the player + $40 for the movie (anyone this dumb buys movies for full price at a brick-and-mortar store) = $6540.
Or, you could buy a decent widescreen TV (it would have to be HD, but that's just incidental) of the same size for like $1000. A really great DVD player might cost $100. A DVD movie costs $20, if you're dumb. So... $1120.
$1120 * 2.25 = $2531.25
So you're wasting about $4000. Maybe when 1080p HDTV's cost no more than 1080i's do now, and Blu-ray players come down in price BY AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE, not to mention the discs cost no more than DVD's, since they aren't really more expensive to print (pennies versus pennies), then maybe they'll be a good buy.
But only when the format war is over.
VHS won out over more than Betamax. It also beat Laserdisc.
In America, people want choice. They want freedom. Even in their tech. VHS was open, with no copy protection, and good enough for its primary purpose. The tech advantage of Betamax couldn't offset the higher price. The closed nature of Laserdiscs was not worth it either.
CD's beat cassettes only after a decades-long battle funded by the RIAA. Even then, we all knew we could back up our CD's to tape if we wanted (we still can!) and to computers later on.
MP3 is the winning format because it was there first, but also because it's free (using Lame at least). It's technologically inferior to every MS and Apple proprietary (and might-as-well-be-proprietary) format, but it's the standard. Just because it's a standard.
A car that can go 60 mph may be inferior to one that goes 75 mph, but who's gonna split hairs if the first one's cheaper and you don't have any cars at all?
HD-DVD and Blu-ray are both DRM-encrusted pieces of crap designed to prolong the inevitable:
---> THE INEVITABLE <---
Technology has been a major growth force in industrialized nations for a decades. The rapid growth of computers, the Internet, and consumer electronics has driven massive consumerism, increasing the median price of a television from $100 to $1000 in 10 years, and massively increasing the rate of consumption (who used to replace their TV every three years?). This has fueled consistently accelerating economic growth, and the proof is in the massive increase in per capita disposable income, measured in real dollars, in the 21st century as compared to 50 years before.
THIS IS GOING TO END.
Intel and AMD are doing their best to fool you into thinking Moore's law isn't dead. (It's not really, the law was a statement about chip complexity, not speed). But processors are no faster. I bought a 2.0 Ghz Core Duo in this MacbookPro two weeks ago. I bought a Pentium 4 2.0 Ghz four years ago in another laptop. Certainly different technology, but there really isn't so much of a speed difference.
Nor does there need to be. Computers 20 years ago couldn't handle sound. Then they could, but they couldn't do music. Then they could, but they couldn't handle motion video. Then they could, but it wasn't theater-quality. Now it is. What the hell is next? Holograms are still a long way off.
Now a $600 computer can allow an average consumer to make his own web site, broadcast his own audio show, write his own theatrical score to his own full-length feature film, not to mention enjoy the unimaginable wealth of information, in every form of media, available on the internet.
What the hell is next? The big secret: NOTHING. Better interfaces, social networking...these things require LESS technology, not more. Vista aside, computers are going to get faster and slicker because of better programming and quality control, not faster hardware. Programmers are going to have to learn to make multi-threaded applications, but CPU's are still going to chug along at a few gigahertz.
If there's a resolution after 1080p, it's going to be even more pointless than 1080p was. But there will be, because Sony and others are desperate to prolong the demand for consumer electronics. To do so, they must constantly deprecate existing technology by trumping it with simple numerical upgrades.
Will there ever be more true leaps in technology, such as from black-and-white TV to color, or from concert performance to phonograph, or from landline to cell phone? Sure. But HD-DVD and Blu-ray are DEFINITELY not that.
If you're wondering, I'm an HDTV owner and a regular consumer of HDTV programming.
My mother got a digital box and it didn't make her reception any better, except that instead of if the reception is poor the picture being shit but still watchable if you are kind of desparate to watch whatever you want to watch, it goes away. Or makes this God awful like "chk, chk" sound.
I made the mistake of buying a DVD Player early for like $500, it was HUGE, hard to use and in 6 months half the price. Why would I want to do that again? I'm a student I don't have that kind of money to waste.
I want to know what the price of the PS3 is going to be in Aus, cause the what they call it, the mega box, the one with all the extra stuff is $600.