Playstation 3 pricing announced

[freebfrost]

If it'll be anything like the Xbox360 (and early Sony comments says that it will be similar), then the space is required. People are already (already! after only 7 months!) complaining rather virulently that there's nowhere near enough space on the 360's 20 GB HD. What with "microtransactions" (confirmed for the PS3) and that whole "online community" nonsense, the HDs supposedly fill up quickly.

I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."

Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways? I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.

 

[Arnwyn]

I still can't figure out why it needs 7 Gb of space "just because."

Regardless, if you aren't downloading new games or themes on the 360, what is the space for anyways? I still have over 50,000 blocks available on my old Xbox, and even with the large Oblivion saves, I'll never get close to filling my 360 drive.

I agree - but it seems that the assumption is that people wil be doing so. (I am skeptical that the number of 360 HD size complainers are even worthy of being called a statistical blip...)

 

[Zappo]

Note that if the cheaper version turns out to not actually have an HDMI port, then it may not be able to show Blu-ray movies in hi-def.

If I have understood the whole next-gen format mess, the downsampling would be to 720p, which is still better than DVD. I'm pretty sure that anything above that would not be visible on a normal TV (and, tbh, I'm not even sure about 720p being noticeably better than DVD on a normal TV).

So, for anyone who doesn't own a HDTV, the "cheaper" PS3 is probably going to deliver the best image quality you can see on your TV anyway; and anyone owning a HDTV can probably afford the "costlier" PS3 anyway. It's a ruthless pricing scheme, but a fairly rational one.

I find this whole "downsampling unless you buy special hardware" mess to be very irritating TBH.

It won't be a better than a gaming PC you can get at the price by much, if at all. Figure that by November, you'll be able to get a $400 cheap PC with a low-midrange dual-core CPU (which will smoke a Cell or a Xenon in most tasks, including normal games), well over 60GB of disk space, and 1 GB of RAM (double the PS3 or 360, though a fair amount of RAM will be eaten by the OS). Add this fall's midrange graphics card ($150, should be about equivalent to the near-G70 in the PS3) and an internal HD-DVD drive ($120, about equivalent to the Blu-Ray drive), and you've got a better game machine than a PS3 for $670. And, oh yeah, it's a perfectly good PC too.

You cannot compare a PC to a console component-by-component. Really. I'm not talking about "ok, the console has a slight edge". A console destroys a PC with similar specs, thanks to tighter integration and more focused developing.

If you think I'm using a hyperbole, try comparing the graphic quality of a PS2 with a Pentium II 300 mhz + 48 megs of RAM + Voodoo 1 graphic card (roughly equivalent to PS2's stuff, RAM increased by 50% to account for OS).

The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it still costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.

 

[Arnwyn]

The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it still costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.

And you're stuck with just RTSs and FPSs. Yay. (But at least online gaming is free.)

 

[Zappo]

A $500 drop for BR players in just 5 months? Wow.

I know, I know. Since I know how these threads tend to go, I am being extremely generous in the interest of being objective. I don't want a PS-hater to be able to say that my estimates are unbalanced towards Sony.

I have also assumed a 100$ drop for the 360, which is also not terribly likely. Even with these assumptions, the PS3 is still a very good deal for anyone that is interested in a BR reader, and a competitive choice for anyone else.

As for the HD space - well, nowadays I doubt that a 20 gig HD costs substantially more at the factory than a smaller one. Even the 60 gig one probably doesn't cost much more. Obviously, Sony is losing less money on the 599$ console (can't say "earning more" because they are selling at a loss).

 

[LightPhoenix]

I expect to see prices drop within a year or two of it coming out. Five to six-hundred dollars is priced well out of what I think the casual market will pay. When Wii and 360 start kicking its butt in sales, Sony won't have much of a choice but to lower prices or come out with a more barebones version.

I'm with everyone else who is waiting a couple of years before buying a new console. I'm more likely to buy a nice big-screen TV (a Samsung DLP, more than likely) so the games actually look nice instead.

 

[Zappo]

It will drop sooner than a year. My own prediction is Spring 2007. Sony is using fairly new technology (Cell, BR, XDR memory) that is currently very costly to produce when compared to 360 (Xenon is pretty cool but not as weird as Cell, the GPU is roughly equivalent to PS3, and the rest of 360 is all stuff that's been around for years and that factories produce very efficiently). Production price is forcing Sony to keep the price high, but production price of a mass-market item can fall very quickly. Also, Cell is currently being fabbed at 90nm, but they are working on the 65nm version. That will cut price.

 

[Truth Seeker]

That does not include games, extra controllers, accessories, etc, etc...

Can you say.$$$$$$$.

http://www.gamespot.com/news/6149470.html

A 20 GB for $499.99 and a 60 GB for $599.99. Be interesting to see how many people pay that much for a console. I also heard the $499.99 vesion will have less stuff.

 

[Zappo]

That does not include games, extra controllers, accessories, etc, etc...

*shrug*
That's true for every console ever. PCs too. Heck, even cellphones nowadays.

 

[drothgery]

A console destroys a PC with similar specs, thanks to tighter integration and more focused developing.

If you think I'm using a hyperbole, try comparing the graphic quality of a PS2 with a Pentium II 300 mhz + 48 megs of RAM + Voodoo 1 graphic card (roughly equivalent to PS2's stuff, RAM increased by 50% to account for OS).

Why not just go PIII-733, GeForce 3 Ti200, and 128 MB of RAM for a comprable? That's almost exactly an Xbox (the Xbox GPU being something of a "GeForce 2.5"), and avoids messy comparisons (the PS2's CPU/GPU were really strange, even more than the PS3's). It doesn't quite work, because PC games are always designed to at least be playable on midrange (or even low-end) hardware, but the Xbox doesn't destroy the PC.

The comparison is simply meaningless; the kit you described will not even touch a PS3 (or a 360 for that matter), and it still costs more. To get in the same ballpark with a PC, you're looking at getting top-of-the-line hardware and paying upwards of 1000$.

If the PS3 had been released last fall (with a DVD drive instead of a Blu-Ray drive, obviously), that would be true. But it's not being released last year, it's being released this fall. Last November, cheap CPUs were single-core 32-bit Celerons and Semprons. This year they'll be dual-core 64-bit Athlon 64 X2s and Pentium Ds (and possibly even E-series Core 2 Duos). Last fall, midrange GPUs were GeForce 6600s and Radeon X1600s; this fall, they'll be a half-generation beyond the GeForce 7600s and Radeon X1800s that are in that space now. By the time the PS3 has any kind of real availability (late spring of 2007, at the earliest), AMD's cheap CPUs will have clockspeed bumps and Intel will defitely have Core 2 Duos in the low-end/midrange space, GPUs will be a full generation beyond where we are now, and standard memory on PCs will be 2 GB.