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PS3 Price, Compatibility In Question
Lots of rumours out there right now about the next-gen consoles. It's in question, right now, exactly how backwards compatible the PS3 will be. Gamespot reports: "When responding to questions about whether or not the SCPH-75000's backwards-compatibility issues heralded similar problems with Sony's next-gen console, she demurred. 'It's hard to say the PlayStation 3 will be 100 percent backwards compatible but as we said earlier this year we aim to make it so as much as possible,' Sakamoto said," Meanwhile, 1up.com wonders exactly how pricey the console will be. From that article: "In the past months, the Japanese blog CoolGamer has been a dependable source of early information regarding the Japanese game market. Not once has their news turned out to be a false lead, so that's why it was pretty important today when the site updated with a small notice saying 'PS3 price set below 40000 Yen,' which is about $400 at current exchange rates."
Wow, speculation that the price of a next-gen technology will be about the same as the price of next-gen technology that was already announced by a competitor, and speculation that there will be minor incompatibilities with older software on new hardware.
In other news, when the cloudiness clears up the sky will probably be blue.
Even the PS2 wasn't 100% backwards compatible with all the PS1 games. If the PS3 plays 75%+ of PS2 games and 50%+ of PS1 games, in my opinion that would be 'ok' with me. Even if Sony only hit those %'s it will already be much better than xbox360 compatibility with xbox games. I'm holding out on my opinion of Nintendo comparisons because they've only said it will play gamecube games, and haven't had any words on price for playing other past generation games (hopefully it will be free).
As far as the price I think PS3 will come out high, but by the holidays it should come down, as long as it comes out 6months before the holidays.
All this is just opinion with no real basis rather than what I preceive as reality.
$400 is a steal assuming Bluray Discs become the defacto HD format. Out of the PS3 and the XBOX 360, only one has a shot of playing HD video; HDCP (High Definition Copy Protection) only supports digital output (i.e. HDMI/DVI). The XBOX 360 does not have support for HDMI or DVI currently - Microsoft will have to make revisions to future models in order to play HD video. The PS3, however, does have HDMI output (in fact, it has TWO HDMI outputs) and ships with a Bluray drive already. I'd pay the $400 for the HD video player alone.