Post by khee maothat you don't have to fidget with minus the occasional firmware update,
Ocassional? It seems the thing needs updating about every other week - and
thanks to PSN's "innovative" network, that process is horrendously slow.
Not to mention the "innovative" service itself tends to brick a few units
each time. Well, OK, that's not innovative. Microsoft implemented the
brick-your-box-by-updating-it system long ago.
Post by khee maosits in your livingroom, is connected to your bigscreen, and delivered PS
gaming, blu-ray, media streaming, internet, online gaming + everything else
for less than a standalone blu-ray player's cost when it was released. now
it's upgradeable to a 3D blu-ray player, which alone cost about what a PS3
costs.
Ah, yes, but only because Sony was eating $200-300 per sale.
Not innovative when talking about the game console market, but I guess
it's somewhat innovative for the general AV market. It also implies that
basically Sony basically bought victory in the format war.
Post by khee maoyou gotta give it to Crazy Ken, because of his foresight, the PS3
just keeps getting better with age. I mean seriously, if you could only
have one piece of gear in your livingroom to connect to your AVR/TV for home
entertainment, you'd be crazy to not pick the PS3...
I don't know if I'd say it's getting better with age. I'm still pretty
annoyed that they dropped PS2 backwards compatibility. So that means I
need to still have a PS2 hanging around. There's also the issue with big
games being delayed into oblivion. How many years have we heard that GT5
will be released "this year - for sure!"? Even other games took longer
than expected to arrive, leading Sony to repeatedly tell gamers "The
games are coming soon - we promise!"
The real innovation of the PS3 is that it encapsulates so many different
features in a single unit. Ah, yes, Convergence at last! The holy grail of
buzzwords for consumer electronics from the late 90s! Problem is,
multi-do-it-all tools rarely do the tasks they were designed for as well as
single purpose tools. For instance, the PS3 can stream media, but its
feature set and supported formats pales in comparison to even the most
rudimentary set-top streamer on the market - some of which now cost less
than $100. Even its blu-ray player is fairly limited compared to more
robust offerings from, say, Oppo Digital. My Oppo upscaling DVD player will
handle just about any audio or video format you can shove onto a CD or DVD
disc - and cost less than a PS3 when I bought it.
As an AV convergence device, the PS3 is indeed marvelous, but as a game
console, it fails to live up to (let alone exceed) the legacy of its
predecessor, the PS2. That is my main beef about the PS3. Sony quite
consciously marketed the PS3 as a blu-ray player that can play games,
whereas the PS2 was marketed as a game console that could play DVDs.
I'm curious to see what will happen next generation. From a gamer's
perspective, I think Sony should use the PS4 to get back to the basics
that made the previous Playstations such a huge success - GAMES.
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It's not broken. It's...advanced.