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“I bought this Playstation 3 to go with my new Samsung...”

Written on: 20/02/2008 by DeclanTM (3 reviews written)

Good Points
Looks
Price
BluRay Drive

Bad Points
Size
Weight
Hard Drive Capacity

General Comments
I bought this Playstation 3 to go with my new Samsung 32" HDTV.

The main reason I bought this was to play BluRay movies and with most standalone players costing double or more than the PS3 and even then there was no guarantee they could play the new type of BluRay disk whereas the PS3 was cheap and up-dateable guaranteeing it was always able to accept the new BluRay profiles which Sony likes changing quite regularly rendering existing players useless.

This system is very heavy and the box almost needs 2 people to carry it and I am not kidding! The overall size of the playstation is also rather big but not obscene and I suppose is kind of justified with all the hardware enclosed inside.

When playing BluRay movies this console handles everything no problem with all the new Java interactive menu's loading on disks more or less instantly (you only get a glimpse of the loading bar) whereas a standalone Samsung player I have used that cost nearly '£1000 takes a good 10 or 20 seconds to load disks. The picture is amazing but mostly that's down to the BluRay disk and not the PS3 it's-self.

When playing games the console comes into it's own and Burnout Paradise looks great, cars and the way they react are great, this is due to the very powerful Cell processors inside the machine. However this does come at a price and the console does get rather hot but it never seems to get over a certain level so the onboard cooling fans must make a good job of cooling the system which is more than can be said about the xBox 360 heat-sink.

The controller is very flexible but the removal of DualShock as standard on the controller was a massive mistake on Sony's part as this is an important piece of feedback when playing games. As this is missing the controller is feather light and feels almost fake and like a toy.

Overall the PS3 is a great tool that can even be used to cure cancer while it's not being used for anything else through the Folding@Home client which I always run while the PS3 is idle.

Now that HD-DVD is officially been dropped BluRay is no longer risky and you will always be able to keep up to date with those new BR profiles that Sony release with a simple software update on the PS3.