Some Hands-on Thoughts about the Playstation 3
Had an opportunity to spend the long weekend with a Japanese Playstation 3 (60 GB Pro SKU), and wanted to share some of my hands-on thoughts. Bit late, I know, but I’ve been traveling. 
For what it’s worth, the Japanese PS3 is basically identical to the PS3 being shipped in other regions. Most games aren’t region-locked, so it can play everything I’ve thrown at it (with the exception of original Playstation games – since those are region-locked for backwards-compatibility, I can’t use US Playstation games to test that functionality.) Blu-Ray works fine as Japan and the US are both Region 1 this time around (thank god!), and the dash can be set to English so had no problems there.
Below are some of the positive and negative aspects I found.
HARDWARE:
Console itself is a heavy, hot-running beast. Not “melt the TV” hot, but not as cool as some folks might have you believe. The heat coming off the vents was similar to the heat you feel coming from tabletop projectors. Ths box is, however, very silent – definitely beats the 360 there. It weighs a ton, and the curved surface makes it difficult to integrate into the home theater rack – almost feels as though it was designed to be on top. I still don’t like the look, but I have to admit reactions from friends are mixed – about half think it looks like old-school Bang & Olufsen equipment, and the other half see a George Foreman Grill.
Controller is better than expected. It’s very light, which threw me off at first, but it’s also quite rigid. Doesn’t flex or squeak, and as it’s based on the classic PS2 design, is comfortable to hold. The analog triggers feel very cheap, though, and the lack of rumble just sucks. The motion sensing capability still feels like a gimmick to me, and the lack of rumble is very noticeable in games like Resistance. In fact, a friend asked me for the “other controller” because he thought his was broken. Sony just needs to get over this Immersion lawsuit and pay up – they’ve definitely taken a step backwards here in my opinion.
The wireless aspect of the controller definitely needs some work. You have to bind the controller to the console using the charge cable, which seems pretty gimpy. What’s worse, if you buy another first-party controller, you don’t get another charge cable – only the controller is in the package. I don’t know if Sony is selling the cable separately, but if so, seems pretty miserly of them. I just hope I don’t lose the original cable in the meanwhile!
Guide button functionality is basic, but works. Allows you to quit games, turn off the console or controller, and see battery status. One can hope they’ll eventually add community-enabling features in the future, but for now it’s pretty bare-bones.
Blu-Ray movie playback is as expected. Using the controller to control playback is less than ideal, but it works. (The same can be said of using the Xbox 360’s controller to control movie playback.) Movie quality (over HDMI) was ok, not great. However, the only movie I had a chance to check out was The House of Flying Daggers, and it appears it’s not a great transfer. Even the “True HD” clip you can download from the online store has a lot of noise and compression artifacts. I fully expect other movies to look better, but for now I’m still more impressed with HD-DVD’s quality. One really poor decision on Sony’s part regarding movie playback on the PS3 is that they did not include an IR port. This means there won’t be any add-on remote controls made available that you can integrate into your home theater’s universal remote. That alone pretty much kills Blu-Ray’s use as a high-definition DVD player in my home as I refuse to have more than one remote out (you should see the drawer where all of the original remotes live!)
I liked the inclusion of the media card reader more than expected. As I had just returned from Asia with a bunch of pictures, I was able to pull several different card formats from different cameras and quickly show them to friends. Sure, I could have done the same on the 360 or the PC with a variety of card readers, but it was nice not having to go dig them up or plug them in. That said, when you consider these readers are also pretty much a requirement (with the lack of PC connectivity in the PS3), I’m not sure I’m all that happy about having to pay for them in the total price of the box. I did have some surprising problems trying to listen to MP3s on a CD-R, as well as listen to WMA files and view JPEGs off of a USB memory stick. The PS3 recognized the CD-R and memory stick in both cases, but claimed there were no pictures or audio files on either. I can believe the system might not want to play WMA files (for obvious political, though retarded, reasons), but MP3s and JPEGs? Really? Note that I did test both the CD-R and memory stick on a 360 and PC as well where they worked fine – so it’s not a physical problem. Anyone else seen this? I really struggle to believe this can be the case, and am wondering if there’s some gotcha here using a Japanese PS3 (though I can’t imagine what).
Integrated WiFi was a nice bonus, and other than an incredibly painful WPA password entry experience (thanks to the obnoxious predictive text entry support – more on that in a second), worked as well as one might expect. Frankly, it was quite nice to find that the PS3 does support WPA. Although one might assume this to be a reasonable standard these days (with WEP being pretty well written-off as being insecure), the Nintendo DS doesn’t support it as of yet, and I believe the Wii has the same issue. Kudos to Sony here!
[Edit: Apparently the Wii does support WPA.]
For all of the “True HD” Ultimate High Definition hype Sony has promised, there are some significant problems. The first is that even the high-end SKU doesn’t include any sort of high-definition cable connection, either component or HDMI. I can understand not bundling an HDMI cable as there’s a perception that these are expensive (not necessarily true), and hence can be a great margin-driving peripheral for Sony to sell. But if you’re trying to push HD as a differentiator, you’d think you’d at least include component cables out of the box. Lack thereof necessitated a quick trip to Magnolia to pick up an HDMI cable (and for the record, feel free to pick these up at Radio Shack as well – it’s a digital connection, so unless the cable is completely broken you’re just not going to see a difference. Sadly, my local Radio Shack was out.)
Even worse, it appears there’s no internal hardware scaler in the PS3. As reported, it appears the PS3 is unable to output a consistent signal to your TV based upon your desired selection (ie, what your TV supports). This means that while I might want to play Resistance in 1080i, if the game doesn’t support it the console drops down to a lower-common denominator of 480p. The game then tells me that if I want to play in the best quality, I need to quit out, go to the dashboard, change the PS3’s resolution to 720p, and then relaunch the game. Oh, and when I return from the game, I’m obviously still at 720p, and not the 1080i I’d prefer to navigate the dash with. I experienced this myself and I can tell you it’s hugely frustrating. This issue also affects people who have older HDTVs that only support 480i/480p and 1080i (not 720p – this was pretty common with earlier CRT HDTVs). These folks have no way to scale the game’s output to 1080i, and are thus forced to play in 480i/p. This smells of the console being rushed to market, and I’m not hol
ding out any hopes for any significant fix. It’s bad, and feels like something Sony would have fixed if possible. My guess is the “fix” they’re working on is going to be a bit of streamlining in the dashboard (perhaps a switch to automatically change back to 1080i/p when returning from a game), but the core issue isn’t going to be fixed. I hope I’m wrong, though, for the sake of all those folks having problems.
Note that I did not try to use the PSP with the PS3 as of yet. I also wasn’t able to try out backwards compatibility as I do not have any Japanese PS1 games around at the moment.
SOFTWARE (CONSOLE):
The dashboard is elegant, and I like the XMB interface. There are times when you can get lost for a minute, but in general it’s quite clean and easy to get around. I do wish that a few more of the functions were more intuitive – it took me a moment to figure out that Triangle was often a hidden command I could use to pull up options. I suppose that’s not that different than learning how the 360 Guide works, though.
Music ripping/playback works well, and I really like the music visualizer – it’s a bit more peaceful than the 360’s visual chaos. Couple of friends preferred having it onscreen rather than the 360’s, though they were annoyed that they couldn’t connect to my music server via the network, and would have to rip CDs or insert memory cards to listen to tunes. (Note that this was in theory at the time – the later discovery of the CD-R and memory stick not working really had at least one friend wondering what the heck Sony was thinking here.) One disappointment is that I cannot play my own soundtrack over games or other experiences. Sort of makes sense considering the rudimentary state of the PS3 guide, but it’s definitely a weakness versus the 360 (at least to those people who use the feature).
I also really like the photo browser, especially the photo slideshow mode. You see your pictures flutter down and land on the ground as they scroll slowly by. It’s hard to describe (and I can’t find a video link right now), but it’s very elegant and, well… “Apple”. My friends thought it would be a great way to have pictures from a trip displayed in the background during a party. I generally agree, though I think there needs to be some additional capability allowing someone with a controller to select one of those images and zoom in on it. Rotating images is also slick as you see the image actually rotate into place instead of just appearing as it does on the 360. Minor stuff, but very nice. If only the rest of the PS3 OS had this sort of polish!
Whoever designed the predictive text entry functionality of the PS3 should be summarily drawn and quartered. It’s the same system as used on the PSP, and similar to T9 where it attempts to predict what they next character you’ll need is. However, it’s confusing as all heck and incredibly frustrating to use. Sometimes you get just one character with a single button press, sometimes you get two – and there’s just no obvious pattern. Even worse, imagine the above behavior when you’re trying to enter in a secret password that’s being blanked out with asterisks – it took me forever to enter in the WPA password. Think you can plug in a USB keyboard? Well, that’s only sort of true. Yes, you can plug it in and it’ll send text to the PS3. However, the interface appears to locked to use the predictive text entry, even if you’re using the USB keyboard. This means my trying to type “Ozymandias” comes out something like “Oz9ma4nd7i5s”. About threw the keyboard through the Plasma! (Note that this was one of the areas where being on a Japanese PS3 might have thrown me off. I could not find a way to turn off this behavior, and the documentation was obviously of no help. Does anyone know if there’s a way for a USB keyboard to work normally?)
[Edit: I've spoken to other people who have not had this problem. Unsure why I did, but wanted to clarify that it may not be a real issue, or might be something to do with this Japanese PS3.]
Sony’s focus on the PS3 being the center of the home means there isn’t any way to connect the console to a PC network. WiFi/Wired Ethernet allows you to get an IP address and connect to the internet, but you cannot find or browse file shares. This just sucks – whether Sony likes it or not, I have thousands of pictures and music tracks on servers in the basement, and I’m not going to copy them to memory cards or portable hard drives just to use my media on the PS3 (if that route even works!) And most consumers are in the same boat – they have a PC or two in the house, and their digital media is stored there. My prediction is that Sony eventually starts enabling PC connectivity – they just have to if they want to be successful in the long run. For now, you should just expect a fragmented experience.
I liked the web browser more than I thought. Ignoring the pain of entering in website URLs (via the predictive text interface I so love to despise), I found the ability to zip over to Gamefaqs.com or Gameratings.com to check on something pretty handy. YouTube and other Flash sites seemed to work as well. I also think the web browser will prove to be a boon to Sony down the road as it gives games and the console a very flexible interface that can be used to deliver menus, content, etc (just as we see it being used in the Playstation Store today).
SOFTWARE (GAMES):
I was able to check out four retail games: Marvel Ultimate Alliance, Resistance, Genji, and Call of Duty 3. Of these, Resistance was easily the best launch title – good story, fun shooter, and looked decent. It’s not a Gears of War, but to be fair, it’s a launch title. (For what it’s worth, I expected better after seeing some footage on PS3 kiosks in Japan; it appears, as is often the case, that the footage was carefully selected. Most of the game is pretty grey, probably due to limited texture memory. And there are plenty of low-poly items in the world – perfectly square bolts being one that caught my eye.) Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Call of Duty 3 were competent, but seemed pretty much identical to the 360 versions (with COD 3 having some framerate issues, but nothing unplayable). Genji surprised me as being a really good looking title – frankly, it’s one of the best-looking (if not playing) launch titles I’ve ever seen. This title alone gives me hope that future PS3 games will have potential.
I downloaded a few game demos and arcade titles as well. Motorstorm was a lot of fun and looked pretty good. It doesn’t look like the infamous E3 rendered trailer (no surprise), but the physics are pretty impressive. World geometry is pretty basic, though – if you pause and look around you see some pretty simplistic rocks. NBA 07 is hyped as being a “True HD” 1080p title – and yes, it does technically support that mode. However, the game just doesn’t look good. Sweat dripping down a face may get some people excited, but the rest of the environment is boringly basic. I suspect this game alone may deflate a lot of the 1080p hype once people see the sacrifices needed to hit this resolution on the new round of consoles. I can’t recall the names of the arcade titles, but they were what you’d expect – one was a Smash TV clone, the other was a Geometry Wars clone. Both fun, looked good, but nothing that you couldn’t see on almost any other platform. I did notice there didn’t seem to be a way to download a trial and then unlock it – you could download a demo, but if you wanted to purchase the full game, it appears you need to download the full game all over again.
SERVICES:
As expected, Sony’s online network really isn’t there yet. You can sign up and get a screenname, and associate that with an email address and password – that all works. And thankfully, it appears you can use the single login to log into games. But once you have that, there’s really not a lot of value at this point. Basic messaging is enabled, but no one I know was ever online or using it, and there’s no way to communicate across games. Games have seperate friends lists, and those lists aren’t integrated into your PS3 friends list. Won’t harp on any more – you can read these two posts for a lot more detail. One positive aspect that I liked, however, is that you can sign-in via your email address/password on any PS3 without having to move your account to a memory unit. This roaming is very cool, and feels more flexible than the 360’s current model.
The Playstation Store is pretty empty at the moment. Some game demos, arcade games, and trailers are available, but you run out of things to explore pretty quickly. Not a criticism here, though – 360 had the same problem at launch, and I’m sure more content will start flowing. It was disappointing that I couldn’t download any music however. Store is web-based, which should pay off in flexibility down the line. It’s easy enough to navigate, though using the controller as a mouse seemed a bit odd. I think I like the 360’s Marketplace UI better for navigating with a controller – mostly because it feels like you can “snap” to locations more deterministically.
SUMMARY:
In general, I didn’t find any real surprises. The system has some potential, and I fully expect there to be interesting games that will make it eventually worthy of purchase if you’re a core gamer – but even then, I think we’re probably talking next holiday before there’s enough of a value proposition (as well as sufficient debugging time). We’re probably waiting for a killer app and a price drop before we see these things really take off. It’ll be interesting to see how well the PS3 sells when supply isn’t constrained (before the price drop). As always, appreciate your thoughts!
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Hey man! Good review, thanks for being thorough about it. The one thing that I want to dispute is the useability of the Xbox360’s link to the PC. While I love the idea, and think it would be fabulous and very useful, my experience of running the Media Extender (think I got that name right) on a non-Media Edition WinXP PC was really lousy, and I ended up deleting the software. It is possible that my PC just had some issues, but the Extender frequently gobbled up my entire CPU for hours at a time (rendering the machine useless) for seemingly no reason, even when I wasn’t streaming anything. I assumed it was because I had a lot of data, but it never seemed to complete whatever indexing operation it was performing.
So, hopefully soon both MS and Sony will both get that whole "leave your data on the PC" thing working right. It’s definitely the right idea! I expect in a year or two we’ll have this all completely sorted.
Of course, your mileage may vary.
Thanks for the comprehensive coverage, seems like the PS3 has some great bits, but needs a lot more polish. Luckily as I am from the UK I won’t have to make any decision tell March 07 at the earliest (probably nov 07) as Sony knows that Europe like to wait
Sony always trying to push PS3 as a PC and how we won’t need a PC because a PS3 will do just about anything a PC can do. But like you, I have all of my media in my PC (well, Mac) and I don’t feel like transferring them or having two storage to keep track of. Secondly, while I think it’s very cool that you can replace your HDD (C’mon Microsoft, give us a bigger HDD already), I’m concerned about the security of such things will provide in the long run. Add that to the free online play, this could turn ugly.
O Andre, how do you like the triggers on the Sixaxis? I found them very slippery and flimsy. I feel like I can break them and I also feel that I won’t be able to press them correctly consistently.
Hope to see you online in Gears sometime.
I have question regarding the Sony store, if you buy an item (an arcade game) can you redownload it to another PS3 console?
For the record, I use the Media Center Extender feature of the 360 connected to the Windows XP Media Center Extender 2005 and have no problems. Even when connecting using the Xbox 360 dashboard using the windows media connect, I have no problems with "indexing", etc. I have about 6000 songs on the HDD on the PC.
The only problem I have is running multiple extenders while using the dual tuner DVR tv functionality. When watching TV on the Xbox 1 extender, Xbox 360 extender and watching it on the PC itself, all at the same time, the system bogs down and the video starts to freeze up. My PC isn’t strong enough to push all that TV media to 3 extenders at once I guess.
Great review! Although, in all fairness, the 360 doesn’t exactly play nice with older 1080i televisions either. Lack of 1080i fullscreen support cuts out a lot of HDTV early adopters.
Aside from that, I really enjoyed your thoughts. I’m looking forward to getting some playtime with the PS3 and forming my own opinions! Cheers!
Sweet review. You confirm a lot of my impressions of the PS3, and make me even happier that I skipped getting a PS3 at launch (first console launch I’ve missed since intellivision). I find it vaguely amusing that Sony is hamstringing the system even more than MS did the XBox360 with it’s limited access to PC’s (why not let me just mount a networked drive) and minimalized home networking connectivity. The whole 720p/1080i thing is an eye opener and scary. I thought it ran cooler than my 360, but didn’t use a temp gun to check it
And I was not impressed with the video in the games (and perhaps I’m jaded by the 360, and a nominal increase in video quality isn’t noticeable to me anymore). It’s amazing that they are charging $600 for the system – this is a killer. Especially if you get your hand on a Wii, which seems to have a killer advantage in controls and fun, and is not trying to be your media center.
It seems like your problems are related to having a japenese ps3. I haven’t been able to get my hands on a PS3 yet but other sites have had no problems with usb keyboards. They had entirely differnt problems with media sticks and cd-r working fine but a mess when using the iPod.
Scaling also isn’t an issue unless you have a hdtv that doesn’t support 720. My does so I don’t care. Since it also uses the came compoent video cables as the PS2 I’m golden.
Nice review. Maybe by the time they can make enough ps3s the old issues will be worked out.
Just thought I’d drop a quick correction for you. The Wii supports 802.11g w/ WPA and WPA2 (AES and TPK). I’m not sure how the DS will connect to it since it only supports 802.11b w/ WEP. I’m guessing the Wii has a wifi 802.11b router built in for the DS specifically.
Hey Sinnix,
What problems do you have with the 360 and 1080i? I have an older set that doesn’t support 720p and it runs fine for me.
Hey The_Hedon, thanks for that info! Perhaps I did have some kind of weirdo quirky config. I had about 70GB of music, probably not as much as you. Hrmmmm. Well, I just reinstalled WinXP, maybe I’ll try it again
So… what’s "better" about the PS3 over the 360? I know it costs a helluva lot more, but more and more I’m having problems figuring out why.
Three things I can quickly notice (blu-ray, PC-based hard drive and wifi), but I’m wondering game-wise. I have my console to play games… I thought that’s what consoles were for. Who the heck would want to go through the trouble of transferring all of your media from your PC to your PS3? What happens when PS4 comes out? I have to figure out a way to transfer everything again? No thanks! My PC is my PC and my console is my console… I’m fine having both and using each for what they’re made to do.
MS needs to do something about switching hard drives, however. This $100 20gb hard drive is nonsense… especially considering that PS3 has a 100 times better alternative. Let’s hope MS does something to even the playing field a bit there. It’s definitely a huge advantage to the PS3 having that ability and one that could potentially lose MS some customers – especially in this age of large files and dl’able movies and such. I’m not paying $100 for 20 gig, that’s for sure. And I’m not buying movies that will consume my whole hard drive.
It seems that even though the PS3 was delayed, it could have used further delays to get it up to speed. It’s nice to have all of this "potential," but Sony hasn’t exactly delivered on everything they’ve promised, so why should I believe this will be any different? I’d bet a lot of the current issues will never be fixed. That’s Sony’s way… release something and be done with it – save for expensive add-ons and such. Reminds me of EA!
Re: "Just thought I’d drop a quick correction for you. The Wii supports 802.11g w/ WPA and WPA2 (AES and TPK). I’m not sure how the DS will connect to it since it only supports 802.11b w/ WEP. I’m guessing the Wii has a wifi 802.11b router built in for the DS specifically."
Thanks for the clarification – fixed in article.
All I can say is, when was the last time Sony came through on all of the pre-launch hype for a console or game? I can’t honestly say that they have once lived up to the claims that they make. I can’t wait to see Killzone in action after that big E3 "this is real" BS they fed the world.
I won’t deny that the PS3 has potential to be a great machine, but, I don’t trust Sony to tap it. I also don’t intend to spend $600 to find out. It’s nice to see that you’re giving an honest assesment also and not just poking at the bad side of things with the PS3.
The only thing that I think they did right where MS dropped the ball is the HDD on all consoles. It may not be a big deal for gameplay depending on the devs, but, it would be nice to swap my 20GB for a larger drive of my choice whenever I want. I just bought a 320GB drive for one my PCs, it would have been nice to toss the old 200GB drive in the 360!
Yeah, your summary is right on the money.
Personally I think you’d have to be rather insane to buy it now, for that price, without specific games you want to play on it.
Next holiday, content will come out, things will change for the better, debugging as you said, etc. and if the price drops some, it may be worth the purchase (especially if FFXIII and/or MGS4 come out).
For now, nothing special.
So you liked the Web browsing experience on the PS/3 … That makes me curious because I’ve had two different HTPC systems (home theatre PC’s) that took full advantage of the VGA input on my 56" HD set … Neither gave a rewarding browsing experience.
So here’s the real question … any chance we’ll ever see this on the Xbox 360 (web browsing)? Everytime someone mentions it over on MajorNelson’s site he chimes in about "remember WebTV" …
Well WebTV was at standard definition and it was years ago. Browsers have improved and we now have HDTV.
Great review. Nice to see it wasnt too biased. As for your HDMI comment. You are completely wrong. If you cant tell the difference between a poor HDMI cable and a great one then you need your eyes tested. Do you get QED cables in the US and A? Avoid Monster as they are overpriced. QED cables rock.
NinjaZune wrote:
"Great review. Nice to see it wasnt too biased. As for your HDMI comment. You are completely wrong. If you cant tell the difference between a poor HDMI cable and a great one then you need your eyes tested. Do you get QED cables in the US and A? Avoid Monster as they are overpriced. QED cables rock."
It’s digital dude. *Digital* transfer cable. No difference at all in quality if the cable isn’t broken… You suggest something like buying premium ethernet cables because the data ’signal’ is better then ;D 1010101
No its not as simple as that. With High end kit it is clearly noticable. I have the new Sony 40" 1080p LCD tv and I can see a massive difference in colour and contrast between the budget cable that came with the HD satelitte box and the £50 QED cable i bought. If you dont see a difference then cool. Your saving money.
The 360 needs a built in web browser. No question about it, no debate. If Wii and PS3 are doing it (and they’ve both copied MS up to this point) MS needs to return the favor and duplicate web browsing on the 360.
Right?
PS3 sounds just like I thought… and "okay" system that needs a lot of growth from this point and possibly a price drop to win me over.
I mirror what was said up there though, doens’t really sound better than the 360 in the games aspect of things.
Sounds like a fair appraisal to me. If it was more reasonably priced I can see more early adopters jumping in.
The only reason I bought the 360 early was PGR3 and a small break on the bundle price. Otherwise it’s only now that decent games are coming out for the 360 and it’s going to be the same for the PS3.
The fact is unless you’ve got money coming out of your ears most people are best off waiting for these machines to bed in properly.
Quoting: "This means that while I might want to play Resistance in 1080i, if the game doesn’t support it the console drops down to a lower-common denominator of 480p. The game then tells me that if I want to play in the best quality, I need to quit out, go to the dashboard, change the PS3’s resolution to 720p, and then relaunch the game. Oh, and when I return from the game, I’m obviously still at 720p, and not the 1080i I’d prefer to navigate the dash with. I experienced this myself and I can tell you it’s hugely frustrating."
Bit like when I start XBox360 connected via VGA to my 1280×1024 4:3 screen. Then I boot up Gears of War, and notice that it messes up the aspect ratio (Squishing the screen), requiring me to exit the game, enter dashboard, change resolution to 1024×768 (a resolution I do not want to use), then restart the game. Or when I swap my display for a new widescreen monitor with 1680×1050 support, and have to ‘enjoy’ 1280×768 resolution scaled using the display’s less than perfect scaler because there is no support for anything between 1280×1024 and 1920×1080. XBox 360 has the scaler, but MS is too lazy to actually USE it with VGA cable to support the two most common PC widescreen resolutions – 1440×900 and 1680×1050. Not everyone wants to spend megabucks on a huge TV set.
While flaming PS3 is fine, get your pals at MS to fix the crappy VGA cable support in Xbox 360. Preferrably sometime soon. And get your QA to actually verify and test all games on all supported VGA resolutions. And also on PAL consoles.
And don’t get me started with the ‘your console is in PAL-50 mode, switch to PAL-60′ bug that prevents a game starting at ALL when I’m using 60hz VGA cable, and no way to switch the ‘invisible’ switch to PAL-60 without actually swapping the cable to composite and finding a TV! Top Spin 2 and DOA4 come to mind as offenders. Dashboard does not show the PAL-50/PAL-60 switch with VGA cable, but some games think I’m using PAL-50 and refuse to work. Goooood job there.
And then we have aspect ratio bugs like Superman Returns demo works wrong on 1280×1024 4:3 screen, leaving sides of the display off the screen. And I’m sure there are others…
hysonmb said:
"The only thing that I think they did right where MS dropped the ball is the HDD on all consoles. It may not be a big deal for gameplay depending on the devs, but, it would be nice to swap my 20GB for a larger drive of my choice whenever I want. I just bought a 320GB drive for one my PCs, it would have been nice to toss the old 200GB drive in the 360!"
You can’t say this enough. We should be able to add drives to the system at will. We should also be able to see and use our networked pc storage also. If ms doesn’t want me to play avi’s on my xbox (transcode360 plug), fine, but at least let me see and transfer files (like game saves) to my pc.
Great review! Very fair and balanced.
Still need a browser and a bigger HDD for the 360!
NinjaZune:
No, you’re purely wrong. HDMI does not work that way, as long as there is enough material to send the signal over it will be EXACTLY identical no matter what you’re using.
Analog signals can be affected by the quality of cables. Digital signals are either there or they’re not, nothing in between. Digital can not fade or have color reproduction issues with a bad connection, it just completely disappears. In OTA HDTV broadcasts, this shows up as MPEG artifacts, typically a blockiness or smearing. Since DVI is uncompressed, it would just completely drop pixels or the entire frame depending on the equipment at the receiving end.
The media downloading of 360 has more value to us than the gaming (we have 4 PC’s for that). Cable television is becoming almost nonexistent in our lives since we can get shows on DVD (Netflix), and I see MS’s content download as a decent alternative as well.
We just think that a 20gb drive is absurdly small, and anything we do will outgrow it fairly quickly. At least, if we use the system as much as we think we will. Access to large amounts of read/write disk space are critical until proven otherwise. Either let us add external 500mb drives, or let us use our network (preferred since we can archive & backup easier).
What you know is wrong.
It is possible for digital cables to have an effect on the signal quality of a system.
Digital is not "in or out" it can have a wide range of visual and non visual errors.
The digital signal is sent over a dc base voltage. So the on or off is judged based on a threshold, like 5 v dc. Simply this means that a signal above the base like 6 v is counted as ‘on’ and below 2v is counted as off.
Impedence errors can create errors in the digital signal. Impedence is a combination of capactance and resistance. Resistance lowers the overall voltage so a 5.2v signal can become a 4.9 v signal, reulting in an ‘off’ when you should have had an ‘on’. Capactance delays the signal based on it’s frequency. So it is possible for the video signal to get out of sync with it’s self or for the audio and video to go out of sync with each other.
These errors can be small and not noticable, or they can show up only on certain types of images. Because those images feature values that are effected by poor cabling.
You can also have grounding errors. This is where the cable is improperly grounded leading to very specfic and intermittent issues where you signal is being reverted to the ground carrier. The effect is when you have a 128,128,128 pixel on a screen it is fine but place a 255,128,128 pixel right next to it and there will be a visual abnormality inbetween the pixels. How the display handles this is fairly random.
The shorter the cable the less chance that you will see an issue.
All that being said once the cable is well made and of the proper impedence there will be NO difference in picture between them. While a 3$ HDMI cable may give you trouble a $20 would be fine and a $100 cable will be no better.
Regarding the controller cable… From the pictures I’ve seen it’s the same plug that’s on my PSP and also on my Blackberry. Those cables have proven interchangeable, you may want to try them on the controller.
I wonder why game system do not have memory extention port like the n64,genesis,saturn for example…it could have make the difference in few year between the 360 and the ps3.it seem than the 2 system have lot of raw power but are limited on memory compared to a pc…
Great review. But i concur with many other post´s here about the 360 HDD. And please tell youre mates at MS, to fix the VGA 50hz problem, as earlier mentioned. I loved my 360, specially after playing Gears of wAr, but after the Fall update, my 360 was bricked!!!? So now i dont have any 360 to play on anymore. I think the 360 is better console than ps3, but its criminal behaviour by youre teammates to brick so many 360´s just so you can get to some few pirates!!?? Please comment on that, i know its off topic, but you were comparing the ps3 to 360 the whole time. So this isnt totally off base.
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RE: Some Hands-on Thoughts about the Playstation 3
That's definitely my opinion after evaluating the system a great deal . Spent several hours last