PS2 Class Action Lawsuit Against DVD Player

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing us to this class action lawsuit against Sony regarding the Playstation 2's DVD player. You can fill in a form on the page to be informed of 'material developments' and assist the case, which alleges that the PS2's "..DVD player component suffers from a number of defects that prevents it from playing a wide-variety of DVD movies." Unfortunately, it seems the lawyers forgot to change the page title, which still reads 'Palm M130 Class Action Home Page'. Uhm, whoops.

Comments

Re:Other suit

[NanoGator]

"So, the PS2 can be used as: ...therefore it is less successful?"

Apples are not the same as oranges. I'll explain why. The PS2 can be used as a console for playing PS2 and PSX games. PSX compatiblity is for gaming and as such does not contradict what I said.

As a DVD Player, as I've already mentioned, the PS2 suffers. The time and money put into making that work would have been better spent making the system a better machine. The graphics on the PS2 looked blurry compared to the Dreamcast simply because of a little bottleneck in the system. Sony had a terrible time at launch as a result of that.

As for the Linux Terminal or the Qcast whatchamacallit, as they are add-ons, they don't contradict my point either. You can't argue that if the PS2 came out for $500 + a hard drive and a crippled version of Linux that the system would do anything but flounder.

"That seems at odds with reality, if you ask me, and probably not deserving of an "Insightful" mod"

No, it's at odds with your perception of what I said. It's not 'insightful' to you because you were applying incompatible reasoning to it. Perhaps you should have asked me to clarify instead of trying to butt heads with me over it?

"Even if you meant it could have been more successful without any but the first ability, I still dont' believe your statement."

Depends on how you measure success. If the PS2 didn't have a DVD player capability, it would have had a miserable launch in Japan. The launch titles with the system sucked, but as a DVD player the system was pretty cheap over there. I suppose you could label that as a bending of the guideline that I mentioned. That'd be acceptable, afterall I don't live in a world of absolutes. However, the PS2 would be NOWHERE today without good game playing capabilities. Thankfully, they had the PS1 to derive all the ideas from. "Well, we don't need to update the controller or anything like that."

"None of the above secondary abilities (DVD, PSX compatibility, Linux distro) have necessarily made it sell any better (although DVD and PSX were important to me, and others) but they certainly haven't hurt it either."

Oh I agree, they didn't do anything to help PS2's popularity. I dobut very many PS2s were sold so somebody could throw on a crippled Linux distro on it for another $200(!). Did it hurt it? The R&D that went into those products were not successful in the same way a game would have been. If the effort were put into a decent game, Sony would have benefitted more. Depending on your perception, it could be argued that Sony was indeed hurt by the development of those products. However, I wouldn't make that claim simply because the game would have to be good in the first place. In much the same way a degree in aeronautics doesn't mean you can be a brain surgeon, it can't be expected that the companies involved in making those products could suddenly turn out the next Final Fantasy.

I have nothing against Sony for the features you mentioned, but $300 is too much for a system. I probably would have bought one if it were released at the $200 level. Instead, I got a GameCube, and I'm quite happy with it.