LuckyK

"You have to keep in mind though that these companies can have a business model saying they're going to lose money, sell their players for below cost, and gain a larger market share. It's not all that uncommon for japanese companies like toshiba to do this."

Actually, in the CE space it typically is unusual. And the problem is, Toshiba seems very hesitant to do this on the scale that would be required. You're talking massive losses, and Toshiba can't make as much back off their machine as someone like Sony can on a PS3 (that also loses a lot of money) - PS3 will make money for Sony via games, peripherals, game licenses, digital downloads, advertisement etc. as well as HD movies.

"And from a consumers point of view the Blu-ray have got more people thinking about buying HD-DVD because of price point."

There'll be a $500 Blu-ray player + PS3 on the market at the end of the year. That's the kind of volume and value proposition Toshiba has to keep up with. They're looking very isolated and out on their own in the CE space with HD-DVD, and I don't think they're up for it. Frankly, I think they're keeping things ticking over as long as they can simply to deal themselves a better hand when it comes to negotiating a deal with the BDA and their share of that pie.

I have to disagree. Unless Toshiba really sorts out their volumes and gets new support from Hollywood, I think this war will be over in 12 months, and HD-DVD won't prevail. You're talking about headstarts, but in the scheme of things, given the numbers involved, that's meaningless.

The problem is, Toshiba does not seem willing to take a gamble and invest a lot in putting many more machines out at the prices they're currently offering, or less. To do so in any meaningful way would cost them an arm and a leg given the per-unit losses involved, and frankly, they don't seem too ready to make that leap. Especially with recent comments that almost look like a white flag ("still seeking unification opportunities" etc.). If Toshiba isn't willing to bank on this format in a serious way, why should anyone else? They couldn't be more at odds with Sony et al, who seem to be betting the farm on Blu-ray, and I think that will pay off for them.

The infinity symbol is a "control character" used by the Japanese trademark office to indicate placement of characters etc. It's not actually part of the trademark, the trademark is just "PS", and the provided pronunciation of the mark confirms that. Another trademark by Sony is "§P∞S", the famous original 'PS' trademark. § and ∞ are just trademark office control symbols.

Interesting parallel, but Betamax had better picture quality, but less capacity than VHS..ahem.

Of course, Blu-ray's PQ issues in some titles should be a very temporary thing also.

As for Toshiba's comments, it does not instill confidence. They should have faith that their format will prevail on its own two feet, but quite honestly, I can see how they might have difficulty with that. Toshiba is looking fairly isolated in the CE world with this, with Microsoft/Intel egging them on from the sidelines.

@ AceMilo:

"Actually sony just threw more money at kojima to get exclusive rights to mgs4, kojima himself said that mgs4 could EASILY have been made for the 360 and would be the same game with the same graphics, etc"

Don't want to start a "did he or didn't he" debate, but he seemed to climb down from that comment at E3. He said there that he could make a MGS4 for 360, but it wouldn't necessarily be the same as the MGS4 for PS3. When he made the first comment, it was in relation to the TGS trailer, and he certainly didn't say "easily". Time moves on, as always..

31 - Moreover, the GPU has lots of nice bandwidth to the CPU's own memory. Very GPU-centric - me likey.

Obviously there's an added latency for the GPU accessing the CPU's memory, but if you're not bound by texturing, texturing from XDR should be no different than texturing from GDDR3. And that's a big win.

There seems to be a lot of confusion over this, surprise surprise.

It's really very simple. Look at the chart. "Local memory" is GDDR3, because the slide is coming from the point of view of RSX. The interconnect between Cell and RSX has been optimised totally for RSX access - and rightly so, because it needs a lot of bandwidth. This means it has full, clear access to XDR, but Cell has very limited access to GDDR3. This is a bit a lot of people seem to be missing - Cell still has full, clear access to its own XDR memory, it simply has very limited access to GDDR3.

The upshot of this is actually good news, for people like me who were sceptical about the bandwidth going into and out of RSX. The memory system design is clearly very GPU-centric, and this is how it should be! Cell is fine with just its access to XDR, but RSX really needs more, and thankfully it has got it. The only implication of this is that if you want Cell to access data from GDDR3, then really you should be getting RSX to write it out to Cell or XDR, rather than Cell reading it from GDDR3 itself, since RSX has much higher bandwidth going in that direction.

Basically it boils down to which chip was prioritised in the FlexIO (interconnect) design, and they prioritised RSX as they should have!

Blu-ray may become more important as part of the games machine, and not just as a HD movie player, than people think. There's rumours floating around about some of the games that have been mysteriously announced for PS3, and not other platforms - rumours that their developers are hesitant to confirm other versions because of disc space concerns. If these are true, well..Sony was right to put it in there, for the sake of PS3 as a games machine if nothing else.

Oh, and to upgrade the HDD you simply remove the old one from the slot on the side and insert a new one. If you can put a VHS tape into a machine, you can upgrade a PS3 HDD. It's not a closed system you have to open up, there's a slot on the side.

And why do you want proprietary memory cards when you can use a regular USB flashdisk for portable data, and theirs a HDD as standard if you don't need data portability?

Some of the complaints here are just ridiculous. The $500 PS3 pack will get you 1080p output over component for games, and 720p/1080i output for movies over component. If you want to be sure of 1080p movie playback - if 1080p Blu-ray movie playback means THAT much to you - then I'm sure you'll have absolutely no difficulty handing over $600 for the HDMI-enabled pack, given that equivalent dedicated players might run you twice as much or more.

Stop the bitching, please, it's getting ridiculous. The $500 should be fine unless you care about 1080p Blu-ray movie playback, in which case - AGAIN - $600 should be a bargain for you.