Sony's PlayStation 3 Hubris

Will the Blu-ray drive in PS3 be anything other than a crippled budget drive that means you'll have to pay for a dedicated player anyway?

Following Sony's lacklustre E3 performance there's been plenty of debate on the strengths and weaknesses of the PlayStation 3. The UK price of £425 is perhaps low given the cost of production but a very high price to play for a games console in today's market.

Sony would like us to think that you're not just paying £425 for a games console, but a window into a whole new world of High Definition media via the PS3's Blu-ray drive. I think this is marketing guff with no substance and can't agree with my colleague Colin Cambell's assertion that PlayStation 3 represents a bargain entry into the world of Blu-ray.

Let's cast our mind back to the launch of the PlayStation 2, Sony had the same claims about the media capabilities of that console too. Sure enough it did introduce a lot of people to the concept of DVD and undoubtedly aided the incredible take up of the format for movies.

It did this at a cost though. PlayStation 2 may have introduced DVD movies to many people but it wasn't a great introduction. PlayStation 2's DVD playback was pretty awful and was crippled by an inability to output RGB signals, in effect making the output quality not much better than VHS. You had to buy a third party hack device to get the console to output in RGB and even then the playback was far from satisfactory.

So users paid a premium for a console with a DVD drive that was terrible at being a DVD player. And many of them, including me, would go on to buy a dedicated DVD drive instead and just leave the PS2 to gaming. Sure the console was a good advert for DVD playback, but not much more than that, it was a technological taster, something like a crippled demo rather than a real product.

I think we're likely to see the same from the PlayStation 3 Blu-ray playback. There's no real need for the format for gaming, instead Sony wants to get the format under your TV instead of the rival, and vastly better named, HD-DVD. Do you honestly think that at £425 the console will be a bargain entry into the world of Blu-ray? I don't. It'll be a good games machine with a really cheap and shoddy entry to a new DVD format that will encourage you to invest in a proper stand-alone player.

That'll be no bargain then, you'll have to pay twice. Paying once for the over-priced console and then a similar amount for a dedicated player that will do the job properly. And you'll then have a very expensive console that will play games well but have over £100 of pointless technology in it that's only there as a Sony showcase that you won't use again.

Look at the high price of the initial Blu-ray drives. Do you honestly think that there'll be a quality version within the PS3 packed alongside that expensive IBM and NVidia technology? Gamers will be asked to play a very high price in November to play games on PlayStation 3. They'll have to subsidise Sony's next-generation DVD marketing blitz when what they want to do is play some new games.