Purchase PlayStation 3 80GB
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
by Migo
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PlayStation 3 80GB
This is not a review about the PS3 as a console, or as just a Blu-Ray player. Rather, let's look at the premise of it as a multimedia AND web machine.
Brilliant Blu-Ray player. Fast boots, not a single disk it has refused to play to date, great picture. Good DVD player, except that I don't think I'll try hacking off its region code protection ;-) I guess it's good at upsampling, but I've never cared much for upsampling myself.
Do get the remote, watching movies with a console controller is a pain. Slight misgivings about the remote - the Stop button is badly located (between Play and Pause???) and bookmarking was much easier on my 3 yr old LG player.
Still, 5/5, easy, for movies. The price is very competitive with standalone BluRay players and firmware upgrades make it much more evolutionary in nature.
Now, for the rest... The PS3 is supposed to a great multimedia player, almost a computer. My original idea was to use as a Blu Ray, but also to surf the net, listen to Radio Paradise, and store MP3s on it.
Web surfing is seriously broken on it. Every single Flash triggers a nagware prompt asking you whether you want to run the plugin. Worse, the browser systematically throws "out of memory" errors on medium complexity websites like YouTube or Delicious. Apparently, the PS3 currently allocates very little memory to the browser. Once you have that memory error, you have to close and restart the browser (not the PS3 itself, luckily).
Not sure how bookmarks work - not very user friendly. I mostly navigate using the History.
Radio Paradise? Heck no, the PS3 won't accept any of their multiple available formats. Same with LastFm and Pandora, though I haven't tried them myself.
Flash support? Some content plays, but not all.
Browser rating: 1/5. My iPhone is more capable, not least on text entry, and that's why I use my iPhone to look at YouTube on my TV or stream Radio Paradise, rather than my PS3. I've given up doing anything more than cursory reading of the no-graphics version of the BBC News on the PS3. Look around the browser reviews carefully if you plan to do any surfing on this thing.
MP3s? Good enough, but not great. The process of importing MP3s locally (energy conscious => I didn't want to stream) is counter-intuitive and, once loaded, the interface is years behind iTunes or an iPod. 3/5, somewhat saved by the Planet Earth music visualizer program which is the best visualizer I've ever seen.
Videos? capable enough on DIVX and other codecs.
Most of these flaws could be fixed, if Sony decided to work on the browser and music capability and provided a firmware update. Up to us to voice our concerns. When those issues are fixed, I'll gladly delete this review and replace it with a more positive one. BTW, the firmware update system is pretty smooth, taking about 5-10 minutes max on a broadband + wifi link.
I have Fallout 3 and the PS3 is a good home for it. Still, other people know way more about consoles so look at their reviews instead.
Overall, 3.5/5, but not quite 4/5. Very good choice for a Blu-Ray though and still one I would highly recommend, you get a good console for free. Just... don't believe the web browser & media hype. Also it seems to run fairly hot, so it is guzzling electricity (140W for my model to view DVDs).
Jan 09 update: with firmware 2.53, the browser displays webpages on most of my 1080p width, with reasonable font sizes. Before, the pages were centered, using only about 50% of available screen width and really small fonts. MUCH better for text + image websites. A welcome step, but the rest of the web browsing issues remain.
July 09/firmware 2.80. Browser has improved, it can show Delicious now. However, it still hangs occasionally, sometimes to the point that I need to restart the PS3. Now that I use it somewhat more, I realize a big part of the browser's handicap comes from the virtual keyboard's extreme data entry slowness. This is why Delicious is a big help (you can set bookmark on your computer). Oh, and though Radio Paradise claims to have a PS3 compatible stream, it still doesn't work. Get more detail about PlayStation 3 80GB.
