As a casual gamer myself, one who grew up with pong, blip football and Intellivision, I was impressed by the specs and gaming experience this thing offered. But from the moment I first hooked it up to my home theater system (actually, about 20 minutes after I hooked it up, because there are several set up steps to go through) I was taken by the product’s potential beyond gaming.
First off, and most importantly, the PlayStation 3 is nuclear bomb in the high definition disc format war. The system supports the Blu-ray disc high definition format out of the box—Xbox 360 requires an additional $200 external drive to play HD DVDs—at full 1080p resolution through an HDMI 1.3 connection, making it the first Blu-ray device to do that. At $600 (for the premium version), it’s the least expensive Blu-ray player out there (as of December 2006) and arguably the best. Its startup time for playing Blu-ray discs is considerably faster than the Samsung player, which launched earlier in 2006. The PS3 is of course also a standard DVD player (though it doesn’t upconvert standard DVDs) and CD player—which at least one other Blu-ray player is not—and even supports the Super Audio CD format. That last point is sort of moot since the SACD format never really caught on with consumers.
The 60GB hard drive opens up a lot of options for non-gaming uses. The system is compatible with both MP3 and AAC digital music formats, and loading your MP3 files is easily done by simply connecting your MP3 player to one of the PS3’s USB ports or you can use the media card slots (Compactflash, SD or Memory Stick) or a CD. Once you’ve loaded all your music, the content can be searched by artist, album, track or genre fairly easily and quickly. Digital photos can also be loaded in the same way and viewed in a variety of methods on your television. In one method, the photos stream across your screen as if they’re falling on a light table. It’s very cool. You can even play music while viewing your slideshows. I created a folder of old Christmas pictures and set it to play a slideshow while playing a selection of Christmas MP3s when guests were visiting. Videos from digital cameras can also be shown.
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