When Sony announced the PS3 specs and prices a few months back, enough bricks were shit to build a house. After the dust settled, fingers stopped being pointed, and laughter was no longer travelling in Sony's general direction (although you can still hear it if you listen hard enough), there was one real sore spot that stood out: the "cheap" PS3 was not going to have an HDMI port. Yes, even though Sony loves bragging about how its PS3 is going to be 1080p for games AND movies, while the X360 is only 1080i, they forgot to mention that 20% of the units shipped would fail to have a connection that supported 1080p.

And now, in a shocking and dramatic movie, Sony has listened to the complaints and has decided to include HDMI on the "cheap" PS3. Of course, this doesn't mean that an HDMI cable will be included with the system. That would just be TOO nice!

When was the last time you read something positive about Sony?

Thanks to severe shortages of the blue laser diodes needed for Blu-ray goodness, they have reduced their initial shipments of the PS3 from 2 million to 500K. Not that anyone was planning on buying one... BUT STILL!

Europe gets the finger as usual, they won't see the PS3 until sometime in 2007. That's a huge market that big companies seem to see as second class and completely ignore until they get Asia and USofA all stocked up. And when you consider that the cost of items over there is usually 50% higher than US equivalent, it seems like that'd be pure money.

Last night, Sony released much needed details about the PlayStation 3 due later this year. There will be two versions, $499 w/20GB hard drive, and $599 with 60GB. The size of the hard drive is the only detail they mentioned as the difference, but there are many other important differences they chose not to share in their E3 presentation, one of them being huge: No HDMI output!

As has been mentioned, most first generation HD movies (both Blu-ray and HD-DVD) will not be incorporating the Image Constraint Token (ICT), which downsamples HD output to standard DVD quality unless video is being sent over a digital connection such as HDMI, and DVI in some cases. By excluding an HDMI port on the "cheap" version of the PS3, Sony is essentially making that version completely worthless for future generation HD movies since it will have to be connected via component (analog) cables. Now even if you aren't interested in Blu-ray HD movies, there's still another problem. Component is only capable of 1080i output, while HDMI can do full 1080p, the "gold standard" of HD video. So not only will you be royally screwed for movies, but your video games will also be crippled - not nearly as bad as HD movies of course, but still a slap in the face.

I think this is really just a way to set the price of the PS3 at $600, because only a fool would buy the "cheap" $499 version. Just like no one wants the Xbox 360 Core edition, no one will want this either. Besides all that, it makes the 360 sound incredibly cheap! Of course, the 360 doesn't have a next generation optical drive in it. Considering the cheapest Blu-ray drive will be $1000 when it launches later this month, $600 sounds like a good deal, not to mention the fact that your $600 will also be buying you a nice shiny video game console.

Regardless, Sony really dropped the ball on this one. Don't offer two versions of your console, because no one wants the shitty one. If you feel you must sell it at $600, then sell it at $600 instead of screwing your customers over.

Look's like everyone's hope for a cheap Blu-ray player sometime soon just went bye bye. (Cheap being a relative term of course.) Sony today announced that the PlayStation 3 will be delayed until November. Supposedly they are working on some extra security features to protect the games from being copied. They're also probably doing it to save a ton of money. I'm sure they'll still lose money initially on PS3 hardware sales, but at that point Blu-ray will have been on the market for 6 months so their manufacturing costs will have come down significantly. We'll see what happens!