PS3 $499 - HDMI NOT UPGRADABLE!!!!
Well, my suspicions about the craptacular nature of the cheapo PS3 have been confirmed. In an article on GamesIndustry.biz Sony confirms that the HDMI on the cheaper PS3 is not upgradable. This confirms what I figured would happen all along: Sony is going to screw consumers one way or another. It was bound to happen I suppose.
For those of you who haven’t been paying attention to the hype Sony’s machine will do 1080p(sometimes), but you need to spend thousands on a tv that supports it and it needs HDMI. Ok, so how are consumers getting screwed? Well standard HD resolutions are either 720p or 1080i. Both HD-DVD and Blu-ray DVD have this nasty problem of using HDCP-HDMI content protection to “stop piracy”. The way it works is that if the consumer doesn’t have HDCP-enabled HDMI, then movie won’t be shown in high definition. It will be shown in 540p. That’s right, if you don’t have HDMI on your HDTV, then the $30 Blu-ray or HD-DVD movies you are buying might not actually display in HD.
Now, there are two problems with this. One, this method of content protection doesn’t stop piracy. Real HD-DVD and Blu-ray pirates will just use specialized equipment to get the HD signal. The equipment can already be bought on the internet. Two, most HDTV’s don’t have HDMI. Even many newer and cheaper HDTV’s don’t have HDMI. So, the sweet HDTV that you bought on Black Friday at BestBuy last year or the year before probably doesn’t have it. Mine doesn’t. In fact, of the millions of HDTV’s that have been sold in the last decade, most don’t have HDMI.
So, in short the $499 PS3 is not going to support HDMI and thus, in a few years when everything downrez’s consumers will be out of luck. Sorry charlie, the Blu-ray thing is a bit of a scam and in a few years when the cheap PS3’s are disappointing customers, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
1. It’s pretty hard to add an HDMI port to a device that doesn’t have one already, so I don’t know why you sound so shocked.
2. PS3 games that put out 1080p will probably still be able to do so on component outputs. AACS rules affect the output of BD movies, not games. And component video cables have always supported 1080p. It’s up to television manufacturers to support it.
3. A movie won’t show in full 1080p over HDMI ONLY IF the Image Constraint Token flag is enabled. Almost all movies being released in the BD format this year do not use this flag. Studios are not currently planning on using the ICT flag in the future either. Of course, this may change if studios start using the ICT flag. But several have said that they will only do so if piracy - because of the lack of ICT - becomes a problem. So you’ll be able to watch most BD movies being released in full HD even with the cheaper PS3.
4. It’s not true that newer HDTV’s don’t have HDMI. Almost all HDTV’s being released today have HDMI. It’s the older HDTV’s you have to worry about.
5. Many older HDTV’s don’t have HDMI, but DO have DVI/HDCP. There are adapters that you can use in this case, and things should work just fine.