Re: Sony reveals details on new Blu-ray players

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SONY will kill themselves, and everyone who laughed at HD DVD, will have a sore ass after they kick themselves many times over.

Sony will milk this dry right until the end, its their first win in what 40 years. Hey, what happened to all the charts boasting Blu-ray?

About the PS3 my kid just bought one and had to replace it twice within a week for over-heating problems. He's on his 3rd one now and bought a cooling pad for it. I just found it funny, using a console for a stand alone player could lead to problems, he encountered his sooner than later, at least it was still under warranty.

66 I don't want to be called a sore fanboy looser, who is overly obsessive about being a HD DVD supporter. But like I said before, thats SONY for ya. They test market their products on their loyal customers. Like they did'nt know that the PS3 would overheat. They must pay their bean counters a whole boat load of ching!!!

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About the PS3 my kid just bought one and had to replace it twice within a week for over-heating problems. He's on his 3rd one now and bought a cooling pad for it. I just found it funny, using a console for a stand alone player could lead to problems,

Either extremely bad luck with faulty units, or he shouldn't have stuffed his PS3 into the empty HD-A1 box without proper venting!

In all seriousness, it seems very few users have had issues with using their PS3s as Blu-ray players. The AVSForum has a dedicated thread on using the PS3 for Blu-ray playback and has 14,669 posts in it! And out of those, I couldn't find a single post about the problem you described.

You went through 15,000 posts?

I'm pretty sure there are threads (even on AVS forums) about PS3 hardware issues. I remember someone posting at least one here.

Like I mentioned in another thread, I did a quick search online on PS3's issues and it seems the 40GB versions are having the most issues. Also people are saying the 60GB version is the best one to get but it has been discontinued.

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[Post edited by Falcon01 on Feb 27, 2008]

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You went though 15,000 posts?

Yes I did. I searched every single damn one of them for the key words "over heating" and "overheating". Being a rather lazy person, I used the "Search this Thread" feature of course.

And BTW, according to everything I've read on that thread the new 40GB models are the quietest, coolest running, and have had less problems than the early runs of the original models. There were a few complaints about audio dropouts on some games that were addressed by one of the firmware updates. That and apart from HDMI handshake issues were what I would consider the only "common" complaint.

I'm not suggesting that no one has never had any hardware issues (hardware of any brand in existence has had defective units and issues), but am saying that they seem to have been relatively rare so far. If 10% of users had overheating issues leading to "bricking", there would be 100's of thousands of users complaining online about it.

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[Post edited by Skyhawk on Feb 27, 2008]

Talking about PS3 fanboys...

I have to say that even cnet.com said the best Blu-Ray player was the PS3, but I'm thinking their main decision was based on the fact that it is the only one out today that is upgradeable to BD Profile 2.0. I'm going to state now that I do not have a PS3 and specifically chose not to buy one, instead I got a BD-P1400 (one more component!), and am fairly pleased.

I did hear on the formerly nextgen.biz currently Game Theory podcast that the PS3 is the least malfunctioning console (something like 3.5% failure rate). We won't discuss the XBOX 360. Anyways, I just wanted to state I am not a fanboy, I freaking hate Sony, but I do agree that you just had phenomenal bad luck with 2 failures in a row and that most PS3s are solid. The biggest thing keeping me from the console for BD playback was lack of DTS-MA decoding/bitstream output. I would also like to pose a question regarding this: if anyone knows, is there a way to update the PS3's software to decode DTS-MA, or is there a proprietary chip involved that could only be added through hardware?

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Talking about PS3 fanboys...

A “fanboy” – not exactly. But I do think for $399, the PS3 represents about the best bang for the buck in any CE product ever made. With its upgradeability combined with the power of the Cell microprocessor, it will be interesting to see what it’s capable of into the future. The HTPC I wanted to build would have cost nearly 10 times this amount, and wouldn’t have given me much benefit over the PS3.

It’s kept me busy too. I’ve only converted about 10% of my CDs to lossless FLAC format and want to add another two terabytes of storage to hold all our video material in uncompressed original DV-AVI format. Then there are all the photographs to organize. They look so sweet through the PS3 on the 1080p big screen.

I’m a little disappointed I didn’t go for the 80GB model now, because I’d love to hear my SACD disks through my receiver's DACs. Currently I use a DVD player to play them, and it only uses its internal DAC with the analog audio outs. Having the 80GB model would have definitely helped cut down the number of cables behind my racks too!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The PS3 also plays Blu-ray disks!

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The biggest thing keeping me from the console for BD playback was lack of DTS-MA decoding/bitstream output. I would also like to pose a question regarding this: if anyone knows, is there a way to update the PS3's software to decode DTS-MA

Apparently Sony is working on it with DTS and will supply the DTS HD Master Audio decoding with a future update. I wouldn't be surprised if they had it already but want to wait until the Panasonic BD-50 is released, since I think it will be the first SA player to offer internal decoding and they don't want to screw their third-party CE Blu-ray companies at this point by beating them to the punch. Anyway by that time they'll probably be more movies featuring the codec to make it more worth it.

Oh well, meanwhile the DTS 1.5Mbps core sounds at least better than the half bitrate commonly found on standard DVDs. I am looking forward to the update though.

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Okay, tell me if I am missing something here. Prior to the warner announcement you could pick up the Samsung BDP-1400 for around $270 at Amazon.com and some brick and mortar stores (ie Best Buy), the same was true for the Sony S300. Also since last June the BDA ran the promotion with the 5 free movies with the purchase of each player. Since the warner announcement the cheapest entry line Blu-Ray players (All V1.0 spec BTW) have shot back up to around $350 and curiously at the end of January the BDA decided to discontinue the 5 free movie promotion with the player even though they had been running the promotion since last June and had extended it at least a couple of times since then. Furthermore Sony boasted late last year that the cost of the Blu-Ray diodes had dropped significantly. So, is it just me or does something not add up here. Be patient, some say, the fact of the matter is that Blu-Ray has a relatively narrow window of opportunity to really make a push into the home entertainment industry and if they don't make a solid effort at making their format more affordable for the general public then Blu-Ray will suffer the same fate as HD-DVD within the next couple of years, at a significantly higher loss to the customer I might add.

1. Prior to the Warner announcement we had Christmas, and that's the only reason why certain Blu-ray players were sold for as low as $299.99. More aggressive pricing on those Blu-ray players were incentives for holiday shoppers, but historically speaking prices always tend to go up a little after the holiday season.

2. CE companies are not in the business of losing money. Why do you think no other major CE company wanted to join Toshiba in making HD DVD players? It's because no one else wanted to lose millions upon millions of dollars in producing them. Toshiba priced every other CE manufacturer out of that market segment, and in the process themselves lost many millions of dollars selling those players below cost. $98 HD-A2 anyone?

3. The current $400/$500 price range for most Blu-ray players is about right considering the technology hasn't even been on the market for 2 years yet. Just look at DVD players when they first came to the market. It took a good two and a half to three years before they were selling below the $300 range. As time goes on, we'll see both player and software prices decrease exponentially, but that will happen gradually and not overnight. People will either have to be patient and wait until prices drop eventually, or make a sacrifice and plunk down some hard-earned cash to enjoy phenomenal HD content now. Just remember, there is always a choice.