Blu-ray in the PS3 - When Is Sony's Credit Due?

When you go against the grain because you feel you’re right, it can be an amazing feeling when everyone acknowledges your foresight and perseverance. To have a plan and stick to it even in the fact of likely failure can be considered confidence or foolhardiness; with the distinction being made once the final outcome has been determined. We seem to be one step closer to such a distinction with respect to the Playstation 3.

One major multi-pronged criticism of the Playstation 3 has been it’s forced inclusion of Blu-ray technology. I use the term “Blu-ray technology” because I think it’s very important to distinguish the Xbox 360’s optional support of HD-DVD movie playback from the Playstation 3’s mandatory support of both Blu-ray movie playback and BD-ROM storage for games.

The inclusion of Blu-ray on the Playstation 3 was responsible (in part) for: a higher price, slower disc reading speeds than DVD, limited availability early on due to a shortage of blue laser diodes, and causing the standalone Blu-ray player market to reach the market artificially late by hogging all the limited availability blue laser diodes in the first months after launch for Sony’s flagship Blu-ray player, the Playstation 3. When you add in the fact that early Blu-ray movies (still encoded in MPEG-2) looked worse than their VC-1 encoded HD-DVD counterparts and that the Blu-ray spec was outmatched feature-wise to HD-DVD, it would seem to have beeen easy money betting against Blu-ray.

Read the whole article @ Sarcastic Gamer

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