Video Asylum

Posted by 4season (A) on February 18, 2008 at 13:57:27

In Reply to: RE: Should I just get a PS3 to avoid the Blu-Ray Profile 2.0 problem some will face soon? posted by bullethead on February 17, 2008 at 09:45:31

It's a pretty good Blu-Ray player, and Sony has handled the matter of firmware updates well--they aren't too frequent, and you usually get some tangible reward for your trouble, like new features. LOTS of computing horsepower thanks to it's Cell processor, and that means very fast load times--you barely see the "wait" animation in Ratatouille, for instance.

I think PS/3 is among the players affected by a buggy HDMI chip and may not be able to actually pass a TrueHD soundtrack via HDMI except by transcoding into PCM. Net effect should be about the same, but the "TrueHD" light on your receiver won't light up.

Sony's Bluetooth remote is kind of dopey (seems to go into power-saving sleep mode!), and I prefer Nyko's Bluewave. Once you have the IR receiver, you can control your PS/3 via a universal remote, but you need to remember which keys you've assigned to work as the Square, Circle, Triangle and "X" keys.

I expect that PS/3's prospects of being firmware upgradeable to BD-Live status are excellent, but if anything like HD DVD's internet-enabled features, don't expect any great added value there.