Sony to equip PS3 with Blu Ray technology...

[Beat]

http://appsrv-3.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3134750

This could be risky. This is obviously Son'y opening salvo in the next generation DVD wars (although there is no way in hell I'm buying the extended edtions of LOTR again), but the last time Sony started a format war, they lost.

However, Blu Ray is backwards compatible with older DVD's, so hope may not be lost yet.

[William C. Maune]

Interesting and very progressive choice, although the cost of the system is now a lot more worrying. Blu-Ray technology isn't even available for consumer use yet and thus as Beatdigga noted this will be part of Sony's opening salvo. While the technology will come down in price as more people adopt it, just as with DVD players, VCRs and other technology when it first came out, I assume Blu-Ray players will be fairly expensive.

I may be wrong here, but considering I can't think of any games that even use more than 1 DVD at this point, would the next generation of game systems yet need the extra capacity Blu-Ray would provide? While it would help out on the movie side of things and that will probably continue to be a significant use of the PS, the PS is still largely a game playing system.

[Keiichi]

Yeah I read about this awhile back. From what I understand its one of the main reasons the next PSX won't be out til 06.

[Killtacular]

It's probably because more gamers will be playing games on HDTVs and Sony doesn't want games to have heavily compressed FMV that looks really obvious and pixellated... but the only way to have it be uncompressed, especially for a game like, say, Xenosaga Episode III, is to have a lot more space on the disc.

[JDuncan]

Looks like HD-DVD is going to have even more of an uphill battle before it...

[Artimus Gigan]

I don't think it will be specificly blu-ray discs for games.(Heck PS2 has some games on CDs still)

as already stated they are backwards compatable, so it should accept both.

Think of it just as a "just incase" thing, if Blu-Ray takes off then they are ahead of the game, if it doesn't, well it can still use DVDs


But Blu-Ray won't fix the pricing on Anime DVDs

infact it could hurt it being new technology, they could probably get 50-60 bucks a disc...

[Zach]

Yes, I heard a while back. I don't have a HD Television, though

[Dogbert]

This was announced several months ago, but Sony confirmed it 100% yesterday.


Looks like HD-DVD is going to have even more of an uphill battle before it...Good! It holds less data. Blu-Ray is much better in my opinion. On a dual layered, single sided Blu-Ray Disc, we get about 50GB. That's four hours of HD-TV or about 20 hours of standard TV. Think about it, we could get entire seasons of shows filmed before HDTV on one BD. Not to mention a quad-layered disc (100GB) is already being worked on.


Interesting and very progressive choice, although the cost of the system is now a lot more worrying. Not quite. Right now a BD Recorder (stand alone, i.e. not a computer drive) costs about $2,500 (in Japan). BD players have not yet been introduced to the market. Once they are, expect them to be cheap. Think about it, when did you first get a DVD player? If it was about five years ago like me, then recorders were much more than $2,500. My guess is that now that BD-ROM specs have been finalized (see www.blu-ray.com for more info), we should soon see BD players for about $300 in Japan. Within a year, Sony could have a cheap BD based PS3 on the market for about $400. Since Sony is one of the founding members of Blu-Ray, they won't even need to pay for the rights to use the format.

[William C. Maune]

Not quite. Right now a BD Recorder (stand alone, i.e. not a computer drive) costs about $2,500 (in Japan). BD players have not yet been introduced to the market. Once they are, expect them to be cheap. Think about it, when did you first get a DVD player? If it was about five years ago like me, then recorders were much more than $2,500. My guess is that now that BD-ROM specs have been finalized (see www.blu-ray.com for more info), we should soon see BD players for about $300 in Japan. Within a year, Sony could have a cheap BD based PS3 on the market for about $400. Since Sony is one of the founding members of Blu-Ray, they won't even need to pay for the rights to use the format.

Generally whenever new technology like this is introduced to the U.S. market it does not start out cheap and it usually takes longer than a year for prices to even drop to $400. On top of that, I don't think there is yet a target date for a Blu-Ray player in the U.S., let alone one combined with a new game system. While Sony won't need to pay for the rights to use the format, the rights to use DVD in the PS2 were only $20 so that isn't all that much of a factor. If Sony can get the price down, good for them, but at this point I think history is against them if they want to get the PS3 out in the next couple years.

[Artimus Gigan]

There was an article in PSM that said developers are having trouble totaly filling a single DVD with media let alone a new disc that boasts even more space.

Essentialy while Blue-Ray can hold more data it's uneeded space.

It's just a data storage pissing contest if they use Blue Ray...the technology wouldn't even be fully utilized...

[Mynd Hed]

Hmm... this might wind up adding a whole lot to the price tag of the PS3 for something that's a dubious selling point at best. Everyone knows by now how glitchy and unsatisfactory the DVD player on the PS2 is. Even if the Blu Ray player in the PS3 is top-notch, that's a memory that'll die hard and make it tough to tout Blu Ray capability as a big advantage over Microsoft and Nintendo's offerings, especially considering that the initial selection of Blu Ray movies will be limited, perhaps nonexistent.

Of course, it certainly won't hurt to have such a luxurious amount of data space for next-gen games, but as has been pointed out, there are few indications that such a large amount of space is necessary for the majority of games. Besides, there's nothing stopping Microsoft and Nintendo from developing their own more reasonably sized proprietary formats which would add less to the cost of the systems, as a middle ground between the ginormous-but-expensive Blu Ray and the cheaper-and-proven-but-more-limited DVD format, and nothing stopping those formats from being backwards-compatible with DVD and CD as well.

Of course, all final judgments must wait until a final product sits in front of us, but for now, I'm skeptical.

[ZorBrak]

All to make the systems more expensive on the whole and the games more expensive as well. Drive that price up Sony.

[TacoHunter]

I don't think you guys really understand how much of a leap this really might be. We're talking high res textures in a lossless compression, even close up to an object, and vastly improve load times. You're probably thinking, graphics can't get better then they are now. And that's where you are wrong. This is an interactive media. There will always be room for improvement.

[guinaevere]

It's absolutely impressive and a huge leap forward technically. I'm a geek. I love experiencing the progression of hardware and software as the years go by. I'm just not certain that the ps3 is the console best timed for it, and not ps4.

And more than that, I'm not sure that I'm going to go bonkers over the graphics increase. I see it this way, there's a good number of shows now broadcast in HD. Terrific. Are the shows better for it? Only from a videophiles POV.

Don't get me wrong, I love my TV, I love my component cables that makes the picture (from dvds & video game consoles) a very nice resolution. But a crappy game is still a crappy game. Even if it looks fancy.

Not that I'm saying ps3 games will be all style and no substance. I'm not. I'm just explaining that the graphics increase alone won't do it for me.

And unfortunately, if the ps3 has an astronomical price tag for a launch line up that doesn't knock me over, this will be the first time in around 20 years that I won't be picking up a major console at launch.

But for now, the details (ie, price and quality of games) are all speculation on my part.

[Artimus Gigan]

Hmm... this might wind up adding a whole lot to the price tag of the PS3 for something that's a dubious selling point at best. Everyone knows by now how glitchy and unsatisfactory the DVD player on the PS2 is. Even if the Blu Ray player in the PS3 is top-notch, that's a memory that'll die hard and make it tough to tout Blu Ray capability as a big advantage over Microsoft and Nintendo's offerings, especially considering that the initial selection of Blu Ray movies will be limited, perhaps nonexistent.

Of course, it certainly won't hurt to have such a luxurious amount of data space for next-gen games, but as has been pointed out, there are few indications that such a large amount of space is necessary for the majority of games. Besides, there's nothing stopping Microsoft and Nintendo from developing their own more reasonably sized proprietary formats which would add less to the cost of the systems, as a middle ground between the ginormous-but-expensive Blu Ray and the cheaper-and-proven-but-more-limited DVD format, and nothing stopping those formats from being backwards-compatible with DVD and CD as well.

Of course, all final judgments must wait until a final product sits in front of us, but for now, I'm skeptical.Sofar games like Final Fantasy and Gran Turismo are notorious for using the graphical capibilities for the system, however FFX and FFX-2 still did not fill one full DVD. Previously on CD's they released the games over multiple disks, however it was sorta unessicary, it just made the game appear bigger, they could have condenced it down to two or three(final fantasy 8's last disc was essentialy empty). Games like JakII and Rachet II are two big platformers and again they didn't fill up one DVD totaly either. They're essentialy the cream of the crop and if they don't need it, chances are other games won't need it either....

[wrenchien]

but will one of those blue ray things fit in tomorrow's digital cameras?

[Roman Legion]

What on earth would one do with that much media space on a console?

High Definition Video? That would certainly help fill up space quickly, but it's significantly more expensive and time consuming to render things at higher resolutions. Games heavy on live action footage or games from the largest developers would be the only ones getting much use out of this for the first few years of the console's lifetime.

Uncompressed, high-res textures? Only if the PS3 has the video memory to spare. That's gonna be a lot of video memory. Video memory isn't cheap, either, as it needs to be fast.

Game content? As everyone else has indicated, most games barely reach the capacity of today's DVD's. Producing more game content requires additional time and money. I just don't expect to see many developers being able to take advantage of this.

Anyway, I'm sure Sony will hype the heck out of this feature, but I doubt it will be of much significance for the first couple years after the console's launch.


I don't think you guys really understand how much of a leap this really might be. We're talking high res textures in a lossless compression, even close up to an object, and vastly improve load times. You're probably thinking, graphics can't get better then they are now. And that's where you are wrong. This is an interactive media. There will always be room for improvement.

Technology isn't a magic bullet, however. The console has to operate under real world constraints. Utilizing that much storage has certain consequences which can not simply be ignored.

And, sorry, graphics can only get so much better. Percieved gain in graphics does not grow linearly with increased performance. As time goes by, the power of current graphics technology may grow exponentially, but the perceptual difference follows something closer to a logarithmic curve.

Graphics will still make small leaps, but the real gains in future games will be in other areas such as physics and AI, both of which still have a long way to go.

--Romey

[Dogbert]

but will one of those blue ray things fit in tomorrow's digital cameras?They are the same size as a DVD, but more thin. BD burners small enough to fit in an average sized digital video camera are still a long way off.