Slashdot Mirror
Region-free PS3
An anonymous reader writes "IGN writes that "In a QA session following the platform keynote address at GDC 2006 this morning, Sony Computer Entertainment Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison confirmed what was heavily demanded for import gamers all over the world and yet previously thought unthinkable for a major corporation: the PS3 will be region-free for gaming." There's no chance that the MPAA members would allow the same for movies but at least it's a step in the right direction."
Even moreso, who cares about stability if Linux allows the moon people to make your computer explode?
(PS3 games will not be locked to anyone, stop repeating that rumour, it has been denied already)
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Actually, what he really said is that the machine itself will not have any region restrictions, but it would be up to publishers whether they want to restrict their games to certain TV formats etc. Which they probably will for many major releases.
Still if a publisher, especially from Japan, knows they aren't going to publish a game in the US/Euro they can leave it region free and let importers have more fun. Still a good thing. Lets hope they get the system off the ground, so far my impression is one of a very expensive hype machine that has to play catch up to Xbox Live. Still, I'm all for having two (three??) great next-gen systems in my living room.
"Europe will STILL have to have a separate set of games because they use PAL instead of NTSC anyway"
Most fairly new European televisions can display both NTSC and PAL picture.
HDTV defeinately does not all use the same standard, there's at least 4 different SMPTE standards I know of 260M, 295M, 274M, and 296M, and most of them have multiple standards within them.
260M is 1920x1035 at either 30Hz or 29.97Hz, 295M is 1920x1080 at 25Hz, but at more lines per frame the spec in 274M, 274M has a ton of standards, all 1920x1080, but at many varying frame rates, including 30, 29.97, and 25, at both progressive(1 field per frame) and interlaced(2 fields per frame), and also a 24Hz frame rate, and 23.976Hz, and then 296M comes in with 1280x720 at 30Hz and 29.97Hz progressive.
So a movie running at 1920x1080@25Hz interlaced will run 20% faster at 1920x1080@30Hz.
Isn't that great?
Sorry, I work with television signals everyday and the massive amount of standards causes me no end of annoyance.