VC-1 has far lower license fees than h.264. Don't underestimate price.
Whoah whoah whoa. H.264 encoders and decoders are covered in regions that support software patents, but that's the encoder. Media which is distributed doesn't incur a licensing fee, since it is simply media that adheres to an open and public standard.
As far as I can tell, you don't need to pay licensing fees to distribute media encoded to the spec. If your products do not include the patented technology (namely the encoder and decoder) then you're good. If you have concrete information to the contrary, please link it and correct me.
This might slightly increase the cost of making Flash products, since they ship a decoder. It also may not, the MPEG LA is really weird about this. I simply don't know. Adobe could simply not include an H.264 encoder as part of their core product, instead shipping it separately.
H.264 encoding software is quite inexpensive. A simple flash player can now play the same video formats you'd be using with native players. So what Adobe has done is admitted they can't compete to lock down a video and audio format as well as an interactive media format. This is a loss for them, but if everyone gets behind it then it'll drive further the deployment of flash, and they can still have a net win.
Yes, but that's for HD content, which is usually played on a device plugged into a wall socket or with a battery which is itself bigger than most mobile devices.
Power consumption is only a critical factor on mobile devices. VC1 not only doesn't perform well here, but doesn't have great penetration here either.
On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.
Imagine if the web became that way, as well. Dark times.
But the H.264 issue is different. Basically Adobe has said, "We are adopting a not-awful codec for our video playing, seeing as how flash video is popular but large distributors of video (YouTube) have shown that they will leave the format to hit the mobile and embedded space if need be.
So now Apple, Adobe, Google, Sony and Toshiba have standardized on QuickTime enclosures (mp4) with H.264 video and AAC audio (when compressed, HD discs can use much less lossy encoding when they want to). How long do WMV and WMF have to live? Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have? Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?
BTW, a number of devices, including the PS3 and the lower end HD-DVD players now expect their users to have both receivers and and televisions with HDMI ports-- those devices lack "5.1" RCA jacks.
Minor correction, the PS3 can indeed output to 5.1 RCA jacks. In fact, it uses the same cable to do this as the PS2. There is some concern that if you don't wire your PS3, then Blu-ray output on Blu-ray discs that specify quality degrading could end up being downscaled or otherwise visually compromised. However, no Blu-ray discs to date actually set this flag, so it hasn't happened yet.
Uhh, can anyone in the Software Industry really promise you that? No really, can anyone?
The fact is, software is buggy. Games come on read-only media. In the old days of gaming, if the game had a bug then that was it. You just worked around it or didn't play the game. And it's not like you could return a buggy game, they simply refuse saying they didn't expressly imply its stability or quality in any way. And the retailers have ridiculous return policies (e.g., "If it is unopened we'll give you another unopened copy")
Some publishers certainly do abuse this system. Most notably, EA and the Tiger Woods fiasco last year. That doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
Do you think it could have had something to do with receiving a paycheck?
This is not 2000-2002. It is not terribly challenging to get tech work, if only for short spans. Consulting gigs are plentiful if you're willing to undercut to get your foot in the door.
Milking investors is nothing illegal and he has nothing to be ashamed of by working for his paycheck there.
I disagree. It is fraud, and I am ashamed of examples of this in my past.
Just because his bosses wanted to raise the IPO price rather than make products
Uh... You're a bit dated my friend. Cheap scamish tech companies don't race for an IPO anymore, they race for a flip.
doesn't put his motivations of working there in question. You make it sound like he was an accomplice in a crime!
Consider it self-preservation then, if you don't consider it immoral. Poorly run companies are a path to personal financial ruin. They will screw you without a second thought, and they can do it very easily.
Exactly. When I was involved in a Dot.Com, it was pretty obvious to all of us on the inside that management wasn't interested in such pedestrian things such as "products" or "revenue." Revenue? That was something you got from investors. Products? Those were smoke and mirror displays, "pay no attention to the little man behind the curtain," that impressed investors with more money than sense.
Why on earth did you work for them then? I dunno about you, but when I go to work for a company I like to see things like a Business Plan on display, and one that's not "Let's play 'Fuck the Investor'". Many of the current web2.0 startups actually do have business plans based off ad revenue. While these may be risky, they're certainly a good step up from the bad old days of, "We'll figure that out eventually."
Lots of venture capital firms are much more paranoid about who they invest in now. Sometimes you see a site and say, "How the hell do they make money?" If their investors are not all angels, the odds are that they have SOME kind of plan. It may not be a great plan, but at least it's not a plan to subsist off investment and loans for 5 years.
Oh right. The same laws that make it difficult for companies (like Microsoft) to screw you are suddenly the cause of all the world's problems because they potentially rock Apple's boat. Face it: Apple could have been more up-front about the battery replacement AND that would have been more beneficial to the consumer. Instead you get to pay $29 for the inconvenience. Good thing I love Apple so I can put them on a pedestal for it.
How could they have been more upfront? It was included in nearly every bit of news talking about the downsides of the phone. Pogue and Mossberg reported it in some of the most well-known news outlets in the US, in both paper and electronic format. It's clearly on the Apple Website in multiple places. It was reported on nearly every major TV news outlet, including the BBC, CNN, and Fox News.
We knew the battery was not something the user could replace over a month before the phone launched! You can't claim a you deserve compensation just because you don't like the product they made. You also can't claim compensation because you dug your head in a hole and then bought it without bothering to even read the box packaging.
What, exactly, does Apple have to do to make it clear that the battery is not user-replaceable? What constitutes due effort? I ask this not as an Apple fanboy but as someone who sells software. What kind of absurd standard am I being held to? Do I have to personally call my users and tell them when my product may not meet some perceived standard?
Considering that every single phone on the planet has a user-replaceable battery
I worked for Lockheed Martin for 2 years, and I had to fight with all my spare time to keep them from doing that to the app I worked on.
How does it happen?
1. Every "senior" decision maker is a relic, or is emulating a relic to get ahead. 2. Specs can be laid out YEARS in advance, turning a good application prototype into a slurry of good ideas melded to meet forgotten and often uninformed requirements. 3. Any interface difficulty can be addressed through enough training! But the truth is planned training is often the first thing cut from budgets. 4. Aesthetics and interface design are considered "premium" functionality, because most dev hauses have poor testing strategies (which are separate from QA). Just getting the product stable can be a major challenge.
First you were talking about Zelda for Wii, and I was sort of laughing cause I've got that on gamecube.
Hooray for Breakfast Pants! Zelda for the Wii is still one of the only really good titles on the platform.
Then you started talking about Ninja Gaiden-- seriously, which console generation are we talking about here??
Go check out the new Ninja Gaiden Sigma on PS3 and you tell me. That game is pretty damn amazing how good a game is a few years after the original release. Reworked gameplay, new content, new characters, new secrets. WAY better graphics. Really great title, not just a holdover until Heavenly Sword.
Youtube, Strongbad, Smoking Gun, CNET. Video podcasts of all sorts. Your answer is an emphatic Yes. There are tons of great entertainment sites out there, and I watch them on my TV. They look and sound great.
Or, alternatively, do you find a $500 game console more economical than a DVI cable you can hook your notebook to when you come home?
Why didn't I think of that!? I'll just require my damn entertainment center every afternoon while I'm at it. And surely I'll have an extra-long cable and a little tiny desk. I'll even get a nice orange sleeve around the cable so people don't trip over it and simultaneously ruin my laptop and my TV.
Get the sarcasm? The logistics of what you just proposed in a real home are so staggeringly preposterous, I wonder if you even considered it at all.
I wasn't aware we disagreed over the MSRP of the PlayStation 3. As I recall, it's around $500, which is hundreds more than the Wii or Xbox 360. Our disagreement is over whether or not it's worth that for consumers in the console market.
So you don't disagree on the MSRP, you just disagree on what they should charge for it?
I'm saying that, if I already own a car, it makes no sense to buy a second car because "you can drive it places."
So people buying hybrid cars are stupid. Their cars could already drive them places, and they had money to get them more gas. Why ever innovate, micronize, or converge products? I mean, what good is innovation? Just a waste of time. Let's not try new things in a saturated marketplace where differentiation takes place by degrees.
Can someone explain "upscaling" to me? I thought it was a fundamental law of graphics that you could always make the resolution SMALLER without losing detail, but to make them bigger requires that lost information (or information that never existed in the first place) be recreated from existing data and caused all sorts of ugliness.
Sure.
First though, it's not a law that we can drop size without losing detail, at least digitally... it's actually fairly complex to scale an image down or up and make it look good at an arbitrary resolution. You end up making some fairly complex choices about source pixels. There is a similar situation with rotated images (particularly when the image is rotated so that its lines are not aligned with the screen grid).
Given that bit of info, it's also possible to imagine a situation where, through a series of math and heuristics and voodoo, you can make a scaled up image that looks fairly good. Instead of seeing jagged artifacts, we might see some soft blurring. The algorithm might scale high-contract regions differently from low contract regions (to make lines sharper). There are a ton of techniques. For an example of this, go to a local consumer electronics store and check out those "walls of high definition televisions" that all play the same thing. Find the one that's much bigger and displays in 1080p instead of 720p. You're seeing upscaling in action. You can often find demos of upconverting DVD players there, note how the image looks fairly good but has a softness and a lack of sharpness. Still, it's better than looking like trash as an unmodified signal would.
You can go on wikipedia to find the descriptions of the relevant math and algorithms.
I know people like to argue that the market only wants divergent devices, and that convergent devices typically fail. The PS3 is a convergent device, and therefore people argue the "want the choice" to buy things seperately.
I think the iPhone opening week pretty much slaughtered that argument.:) Integrated devices, when done well, can be powerfully compelling products.
When I think about getting a game console, I'm only thinking about games.
I was in the lucky position of buying the PS3 as I was building my home entertainment system. In this capacity, I saved a metric ass-ton of money. The PS3 was so crazily cheap compared to the morass of equipment to provide its functionality that it wasn't even a contest.
The PS3 is a bad deal right now, and I'm not sure it will recover past the point where it's actually worth it to have it AND my 360. And with no games I'm certainly not going to take that bet right now.
By this measure, the Wii is also a raw deal. Are you willing to go that route, or are you going to trust that Nintendo will suddenly flood the market with a lot more great games. Because their track record on non-handhelds hasn't been any good since like, the SNES. The backwards compatibility is not something that should be dismissed. A lot of reallyinterestinggames are still being released for the PS2 in addition to the fairly good (though very sparse) PS3 content.
I cannot imagine going back to standard definition television. I'd rather not watch TV. Now that I'm used to progressive signals, I swear I can feel the interlacing in my teeth when I watch older standard definition television.
What is this "media PC"? Even a normal PC does every single thing on your list, and some of those things (web browsing, running Linux, wireless networking) are the sorts of things a PC inherently does. Oh, and my DVD player upconverts to whatever screen resolution I happen to be running at the time. It even downconverts, if I really want to run in 640 by 480.
When you leave the dorm, maybe you'll get it. I don't want to call everyone over to my computer to watch a movie. I want to sit down on my nice couch in front of a large screen with decent speakers and enjoy a movie or game. Have you considered that game consoles are a luxury product, and maybe you're not in that target market?
Yeah, maybe if you don't have a computer already. Duplicating features that your existing devices already do much better does not make a "better value". That's like saying PS3 is a better value if it includes a refrigerated compartment for beer, even if it only holds two cans and requires that I switch out of playing my game to "eject can" mode in order to get one. That's an incredibly stupid argument when most people already own refrigerators.
Wait. That isn't the argument you've pressed in your post. Your argument is, "I already have a device that does that, therefore a PS3 is not worth it to anyone." Since when does the MSRP of an object vary based off what's in your house? Are you suggesting that you should get a discount on a car because you already own another? Should an ear of corn cost less because I have a tomato? Both are edible, after all...
I do have a computer already, yes. But I don't keep it next to the TV, and my computer may _stream_ media to my PS3, but it certainly isn't the thing doing the playing. And the PS3's graphics are competitive with the most expensive gaming PCs.
Maybe I'm just not living out of one room anymore, so I can't understand how you could compare a computer experience to a console experience. This is doubly true for laptops, which are what the overwhelming majority of people are buying these days (because of precipitous drops in price). Maybe what you're saying is, "I don't have a nice television, so why would I want a PS3?"
But besides that, your post is argumentative and you're demanding I justify a PS3 to you. I don't know you, I don't care to know you. All I can say is that, given a feature list like that, $500 is a very competitive market price. Heck, even the current $600 is competitive if you compare it to the cost of replicating that device with an Xbox 360 (I know, I know, you don't _have_ to do that). I do know that if you ran out and purchased a slew of inexpensive electronics products to replicate as much of the PS3 as you could, you'd surely spend more than $500-$600.
If you have a big PS2 game selection, you probably own a PS2 console already. And if you don't, you can buy one for 1/4 the price of a PS3. It's not a very persuasive selling point for the PS3.
On this I disagree. The up-conversion makes PS2 games bearable on high definition displays. I couldn't finish Valkyrie Profile 2 because it felt like it was sawing my eyes. Once the PS3 started upscaling that, I could play it without distress. Since a lot of new games are coming out for the PS2 still, having a backwards-compatible PS3 means you can have 1 console handle a lot more work, and make it look better on a new TV.
I use my PS3 more than any other device in my house short of my laptop and phone. It's on all the time, doing things ranging from bittorrent downloading (in linux) to DVD playing (Xbar) to playing games (Super Startdust HD is the Geometry Wars analogue I've been waiting for for the PS3).
With the exception of the Cell processor and a different selection of "fairly good online content", I already own something that does all of these things. And unless you're also using your PS3 to post on Slashdot, so do you.
Well, snarkily I note you left the online store content in there. But...
Most computers are busy doing other things, and make . If you've got a media PC already hooked up, great for you. Don't get a PS3. I am not trying to tell you that you should buy a PS3. I am just saying that a $500 price tag is a competitive one for the device feature set. Quite frankly, it's a better value than the XBox 360.
I know Sony hating has been popular on slashdot, and I like to try and separate this from the PS3. I've got years of good karma banked, so I'm going to spend 5 minutes making a list of what my PS3 does, for its price.
Plays PS3 games
Plays Blu-Ray discs.
Upconverting (1080i) DVD player
Cross platform (Win/Mac/Linux) streaming media player (H.264, MPEG2,Many AVI-contained formats)
Local media player (variety of flash memory cards and external hard drives)
Can browse the internet w/ flash support
Can access sonys (admitted lackluster, but definitely there) Online Store.
Sonys online store deals in real money, not points (which are only bought in increments which do not divide evenly into common prices).
Sonys online store offers PSP content if you have one (more and more people do, they are becoming quite common now)
Plays a variety of farily good online content, with feature titles including Calling All Cars and the recent Super Stardust HD.
Can play most PS2 games with excellent upscaling (looks great) (nearly all games with non-UK release)
Can play most PS1 games (non-UK release) (upconversion to 480p, looks about as good as youd expect from such old tech)
Uses standard bluetooth and USB for all peripherals. You can use your existing bluetooth headset.
It can run linux. It cannot access the video hardware, but thats boring anyways. The Cell processor is far more exciting.
802.11b/g right out of the box. No external adaptor required.
While PS3 failure is not unheard of, the box has an unquestionably better reliability rate than the Xbox 360, its major competitor.
To get an Xbox 360 that is feature competitive (elite or not), you're going to be paying within $50 of the price of the current PS3. And even then, the Xbox 360 is far less cross-platform friendly, using nonstandard technology for its media streaming and peripherals. And you'll need to spend extra money for a HD-DVD box (if that's your thing). If you're considering buying a traditional game console, the PS3 is very competitive to the XBox 360 (especially so given the troubling reliability issues with the 360, I myself am on my third which refuses to play Gears of War!)
In comparison to the Wii, I advise you go for the Wii first unless you have a big PS2 game selection, in which case the PS3 will probably be a better value. The Wii and PS3 are both game systems, but the Wii is the interesting bargain product and the PS3 is the luxury product. This is not a representation of Wii dominance, it's a representation of supply/demand economics and how they interact with MSRPs. For many people, the Wii is a lever to get gaming into homes that aren't otherwise receptive to it. That's awesome, it's the tide that raises all the boats, and no one can deny the Wii is an interesting an innovative console. I like it, I waited overnight for mine, I endorse it.
But right now, the Wii isn't much more atttractive a platform than the PS3, if you get fair about the comparison. It's only got three really great titles (WiiPlay, Zelda and Paper Mario) and a release schedule that's nearly as lackluster as the PS3's. It's got a lot of development difficulty (instead of wrangling the cell, you're designing for a completely new and somewhat alien control system that requires a lot of realtime analysis of multiple data streams).
I totally understand waiting on buying a PS3. The platform only has a few really great titles right now (Motorstorm and recently the revised Ninja Gaiden Sigma), so it's entirely reasonable to wait. But to say that this $100 price drop doesn't make it competitive is just absurd and it's hater-aide. Don't buy into the anti-hype surrounding the platform.
Disclosure: I own all 3 consoles, a high def television. I am a supporter of Blu-ray as a recordable data standard. My Wii has stayed quiet since I beat Paper Mario, my Xbox 360 (2rd replacement) has just shown hardware defects and I'm told to send it in again. I do not work or take money from any video game company or Sony. I run both mac and linux boxes in my home, so an open media streaming capability is important to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Whoah whoah whoa. H.264 encoders and decoders are covered in regions that support software patents, but that's the encoder. Media which is distributed doesn't incur a licensing fee, since it is simply media that adheres to an open and public standard.
As far as I can tell, you don't need to pay licensing fees to distribute media encoded to the spec. If your products do not include the patented technology (namely the encoder and decoder) then you're good. If you have concrete information to the contrary, please link it and correct me.
This might slightly increase the cost of making Flash products, since they ship a decoder. It also may not, the MPEG LA is really weird about this. I simply don't know. Adobe could simply not include an H.264 encoder as part of their core product, instead shipping it separately.
Highly doubt all you want, but AppleTVs already pull raw h264 streams. So do iPhones.
H.264 encoding software is quite inexpensive. A simple flash player can now play the same video formats you'd be using with native players. So what Adobe has done is admitted they can't compete to lock down a video and audio format as well as an interactive media format. This is a loss for them, but if everyone gets behind it then it'll drive further the deployment of flash, and they can still have a net win.
Point taken.
But now that they're using a standard media format, why use flash for HD content on media PCs?
Yes, but that's for HD content, which is usually played on a device plugged into a wall socket or with a battery which is itself bigger than most mobile devices.
Power consumption is only a critical factor on mobile devices. VC1 not only doesn't perform well here, but doesn't have great penetration here either.
On the subject of Flash Hating, I can tell you the deep fear lurking in every web developer's heart. One day, in a bleak and post-apocalyptic future, Adobe could own the web and web design the way they utterly own print media. They're already on the verge of this, since the vast majority of professionally designed websites use Illustrator and a bit of Photoshop to create their images. Adobe gets to charge $300-$1200 to every graphic designer who expects to be taken seriously.
Imagine if the web became that way, as well. Dark times.
But the H.264 issue is different. Basically Adobe has said, "We are adopting a not-awful codec for our video playing, seeing as how flash video is popular but large distributors of video (YouTube) have shown that they will leave the format to hit the mobile and embedded space if need be.
So now Apple, Adobe, Google, Sony and Toshiba have standardized on QuickTime enclosures (mp4) with H.264 video and AAC audio (when compressed, HD discs can use much less lossy encoding when they want to). How long do WMV and WMF have to live? Now that Flash can play high-quality HD video (and extremely-small-file-size SD video), and preparing with one codec can prepare for everything from phones to HD televisions, what appeal does Microsoft's codecs and containers have? Surely no one can suggest that Windows Media Player has better deployment than Adobe's Flash?
My bad. I was seeing the comment I expected to see (PS3 HDMI ONLY ZOMGZORS). I apologize.
Minor correction, the PS3 can indeed output to 5.1 RCA jacks. In fact, it uses the same cable to do this as the PS2. There is some concern that if you don't wire your PS3, then Blu-ray output on Blu-ray discs that specify quality degrading could end up being downscaled or otherwise visually compromised. However, no Blu-ray discs to date actually set this flag, so it hasn't happened yet.
Uhh, can anyone in the Software Industry really promise you that? No really, can anyone?
The fact is, software is buggy. Games come on read-only media. In the old days of gaming, if the game had a bug then that was it. You just worked around it or didn't play the game. And it's not like you could return a buggy game, they simply refuse saying they didn't expressly imply its stability or quality in any way. And the retailers have ridiculous return policies (e.g., "If it is unopened we'll give you another unopened copy")
Some publishers certainly do abuse this system. Most notably, EA and the Tiger Woods fiasco last year. That doesn't mean it's inherently bad.
This is not 2000-2002. It is not terribly challenging to get tech work, if only for short spans. Consulting gigs are plentiful if you're willing to undercut to get your foot in the door.
I disagree. It is fraud, and I am ashamed of examples of this in my past.
Uh... You're a bit dated my friend. Cheap scamish tech companies don't race for an IPO anymore, they race for a flip.
Consider it self-preservation then, if you don't consider it immoral. Poorly run companies are a path to personal financial ruin. They will screw you without a second thought, and they can do it very easily.
Why on earth did you work for them then? I dunno about you, but when I go to work for a company I like to see things like a Business Plan on display, and one that's not "Let's play 'Fuck the Investor'". Many of the current web2.0 startups actually do have business plans based off ad revenue. While these may be risky, they're certainly a good step up from the bad old days of, "We'll figure that out eventually."
Lots of venture capital firms are much more paranoid about who they invest in now. Sometimes you see a site and say, "How the hell do they make money?" If their investors are not all angels, the odds are that they have SOME kind of plan. It may not be a great plan, but at least it's not a plan to subsist off investment and loans for 5 years.
How could they have been more upfront? It was included in nearly every bit of news talking about the downsides of the phone. Pogue and Mossberg reported it in some of the most well-known news outlets in the US, in both paper and electronic format. It's clearly on the Apple Website in multiple places. It was reported on nearly every major TV news outlet, including the BBC, CNN, and Fox News.
We knew the battery was not something the user could replace over a month before the phone launched! You can't claim a you deserve compensation just because you don't like the product they made. You also can't claim compensation because you dug your head in a hole and then bought it without bothering to even read the box packaging.
What, exactly, does Apple have to do to make it clear that the battery is not user-replaceable? What constitutes due effort? I ask this not as an Apple fanboy but as someone who sells software. What kind of absurd standard am I being held to? Do I have to personally call my users and tell them when my product may not meet some perceived standard?
This is also false.
I worked for Lockheed Martin for 2 years, and I had to fight with all my spare time to keep them from doing that to the app I worked on.
How does it happen?
1. Every "senior" decision maker is a relic, or is emulating a relic to get ahead.
2. Specs can be laid out YEARS in advance, turning a good application prototype into a slurry of good ideas melded to meet forgotten and often uninformed requirements.
3. Any interface difficulty can be addressed through enough training! But the truth is planned training is often the first thing cut from budgets.
4. Aesthetics and interface design are considered "premium" functionality, because most dev hauses have poor testing strategies (which are separate from QA). Just getting the product stable can be a major challenge.
Or so my experience suggests...
Or functionality. Or completeness.
Hooray for Breakfast Pants! Zelda for the Wii is still one of the only really good titles on the platform.
Go check out the new Ninja Gaiden Sigma on PS3 and you tell me. That game is pretty damn amazing how good a game is a few years after the original release. Reworked gameplay, new content, new characters, new secrets. WAY better graphics. Really great title, not just a holdover until Heavenly Sword.
Youtube, Strongbad, Smoking Gun, CNET. Video podcasts of all sorts. Your answer is an emphatic Yes. There are tons of great entertainment sites out there, and I watch them on my TV. They look and sound great.
Why didn't I think of that!? I'll just require my damn entertainment center every afternoon while I'm at it. And surely I'll have an extra-long cable and a little tiny desk. I'll even get a nice orange sleeve around the cable so people don't trip over it and simultaneously ruin my laptop and my TV.
Get the sarcasm? The logistics of what you just proposed in a real home are so staggeringly preposterous, I wonder if you even considered it at all.
So you don't disagree on the MSRP, you just disagree on what they should charge for it?
So people buying hybrid cars are stupid. Their cars could already drive them places, and they had money to get them more gas. Why ever innovate, micronize, or converge products? I mean, what good is innovation? Just a waste of time. Let's not try new things in a saturated marketplace where differentiation takes place by degrees.
Sure.
First though, it's not a law that we can drop size without losing detail, at least digitally... it's actually fairly complex to scale an image down or up and make it look good at an arbitrary resolution. You end up making some fairly complex choices about source pixels. There is a similar situation with rotated images (particularly when the image is rotated so that its lines are not aligned with the screen grid).
Given that bit of info, it's also possible to imagine a situation where, through a series of math and heuristics and voodoo, you can make a scaled up image that looks fairly good. Instead of seeing jagged artifacts, we might see some soft blurring. The algorithm might scale high-contract regions differently from low contract regions (to make lines sharper). There are a ton of techniques. For an example of this, go to a local consumer electronics store and check out those "walls of high definition televisions" that all play the same thing. Find the one that's much bigger and displays in 1080p instead of 720p. You're seeing upscaling in action. You can often find demos of upconverting DVD players there, note how the image looks fairly good but has a softness and a lack of sharpness. Still, it's better than looking like trash as an unmodified signal would.
You can go on wikipedia to find the descriptions of the relevant math and algorithms.
I know people like to argue that the market only wants divergent devices, and that convergent devices typically fail. The PS3 is a convergent device, and therefore people argue the "want the choice" to buy things seperately.
:) Integrated devices, when done well, can be powerfully compelling products.
I think the iPhone opening week pretty much slaughtered that argument.
I was in the lucky position of buying the PS3 as I was building my home entertainment system. In this capacity, I saved a metric ass-ton of money. The PS3 was so crazily cheap compared to the morass of equipment to provide its functionality that it wasn't even a contest.
By this measure, the Wii is also a raw deal. Are you willing to go that route, or are you going to trust that Nintendo will suddenly flood the market with a lot more great games. Because their track record on non-handhelds hasn't been any good since like, the SNES. The backwards compatibility is not something that should be dismissed. A lot of really interesting games are still being released for the PS2 in addition to the fairly good (though very sparse) PS3 content.
I cannot imagine going back to standard definition television. I'd rather not watch TV. Now that I'm used to progressive signals, I swear I can feel the interlacing in my teeth when I watch older standard definition television.
When you leave the dorm, maybe you'll get it. I don't want to call everyone over to my computer to watch a movie. I want to sit down on my nice couch in front of a large screen with decent speakers and enjoy a movie or game. Have you considered that game consoles are a luxury product, and maybe you're not in that target market?
Wait. That isn't the argument you've pressed in your post. Your argument is, "I already have a device that does that, therefore a PS3 is not worth it to anyone." Since when does the MSRP of an object vary based off what's in your house? Are you suggesting that you should get a discount on a car because you already own another? Should an ear of corn cost less because I have a tomato? Both are edible, after all...
I do have a computer already, yes. But I don't keep it next to the TV, and my computer may _stream_ media to my PS3, but it certainly isn't the thing doing the playing. And the PS3's graphics are competitive with the most expensive gaming PCs.
Maybe I'm just not living out of one room anymore, so I can't understand how you could compare a computer experience to a console experience. This is doubly true for laptops, which are what the overwhelming majority of people are buying these days (because of precipitous drops in price). Maybe what you're saying is, "I don't have a nice television, so why would I want a PS3?"
But besides that, your post is argumentative and you're demanding I justify a PS3 to you. I don't know you, I don't care to know you. All I can say is that, given a feature list like that, $500 is a very competitive market price. Heck, even the current $600 is competitive if you compare it to the cost of replicating that device with an Xbox 360 (I know, I know, you don't _have_ to do that). I do know that if you ran out and purchased a slew of inexpensive electronics products to replicate as much of the PS3 as you could, you'd surely spend more than $500-$600.
On this I disagree. The up-conversion makes PS2 games bearable on high definition displays. I couldn't finish Valkyrie Profile 2 because it felt like it was sawing my eyes. Once the PS3 started upscaling that, I could play it without distress. Since a lot of new games are coming out for the PS2 still, having a backwards-compatible PS3 means you can have 1 console handle a lot more work, and make it look better on a new TV.
I use my PS3 more than any other device in my house short of my laptop and phone. It's on all the time, doing things ranging from bittorrent downloading (in linux) to DVD playing (Xbar) to playing games (Super Startdust HD is the Geometry Wars analogue I've been waiting for for the PS3).
Well, snarkily I note you left the online store content in there. But...
Most computers are busy doing other things, and make . If you've got a media PC already hooked up, great for you. Don't get a PS3. I am not trying to tell you that you should buy a PS3. I am just saying that a $500 price tag is a competitive one for the device feature set. Quite frankly, it's a better value than the XBox 360.
Unless you've been stalling a system update, it sure does. Run a DVD and have your tv show the output signal.
The PS3 is _slightly_ better than my TV's built in scaler for going from 480->1080, so I'm using it for now.
To get an Xbox 360 that is feature competitive (elite or not), you're going to be paying within $50 of the price of the current PS3. And even then, the Xbox 360 is far less cross-platform friendly, using nonstandard technology for its media streaming and peripherals. And you'll need to spend extra money for a HD-DVD box (if that's your thing). If you're considering buying a traditional game console, the PS3 is very competitive to the XBox 360 (especially so given the troubling reliability issues with the 360, I myself am on my third which refuses to play Gears of War!)
In comparison to the Wii, I advise you go for the Wii first unless you have a big PS2 game selection, in which case the PS3 will probably be a better value. The Wii and PS3 are both game systems, but the Wii is the interesting bargain product and the PS3 is the luxury product. This is not a representation of Wii dominance, it's a representation of supply/demand economics and how they interact with MSRPs. For many people, the Wii is a lever to get gaming into homes that aren't otherwise receptive to it. That's awesome, it's the tide that raises all the boats, and no one can deny the Wii is an interesting an innovative console. I like it, I waited overnight for mine, I endorse it.
But right now, the Wii isn't much more atttractive a platform than the PS3, if you get fair about the comparison. It's only got three really great titles (WiiPlay, Zelda and Paper Mario) and a release schedule that's nearly as lackluster as the PS3's. It's got a lot of development difficulty (instead of wrangling the cell, you're designing for a completely new and somewhat alien control system that requires a lot of realtime analysis of multiple data streams).
I totally understand waiting on buying a PS3. The platform only has a few really great titles right now (Motorstorm and recently the revised Ninja Gaiden Sigma), so it's entirely reasonable to wait. But to say that this $100 price drop doesn't make it competitive is just absurd and it's hater-aide. Don't buy into the anti-hype surrounding the platform.
Disclosure: I own all 3 consoles, a high def television. I am a supporter of Blu-ray as a recordable data standard. My Wii has stayed quiet since I beat Paper Mario, my Xbox 360 (2rd replacement) has just shown hardware defects and I'm told to send it in again. I do not work or take money from any video game company or Sony. I run both mac and linux boxes in my home, so an open media streaming capability is important to me.