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PlayStation (Games) Entertainment Games

Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3 335

Posted by timothy from the take-that-other-formats dept.
fenimor writes "Sony announced today that it had begun preparations to adopt Blu-ray Disc ROM (BD-ROM) format as a medium for the next generation PlayStation. Single side double layer Blu-Ray discs have a huge memory size of 54 GB, being an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications. Next month Sony plans to announce a 200GB 8-layer version of BD-ROM according to MacWorld."
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Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3 More

Sony Adopts Blu-ray Disc PlayStation 3

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  • I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JaffaKREE ( 766802 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:51PM (#10321289)
    how badly a small scratch will affect these ? How much data redundancy is there ?

    • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:54PM (#10321339)

      Lots. That was a common concern when DVDs came out but there is a lot more data correction on DVD. Same so with BluRay See the FAQ [dvddemystified.com]

      • but DVDs suck ... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Heisenbug ( 122836 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @05:19PM (#10323134)
        My title is wrong, but it's true that in my experience DVDs could benefit a lot from better error correction. I can't think of the last video tape I rented that had significant playback problems, but I can think of the last 5 DVDs that did. I would love to see a movie encoded on something like Blooray that has a full-on four way backup of the data, so it has to be scratched in exactly the wrong four places at once before it'll skip. I'm sure there are cleverer ways to make error checking more efficient, but you get the idea -- like the grandparent, I hope like hell they'll throw more data at this problem, because right now DVDs strike me as anything but permanent under normal use.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:56PM (#10321367)
      And, just how many games will ever use that much space? Considering a large slice of PS2 games that come on DVD are just barely scraping a single gig (and filled to the brim with empty "dummy files") I'd be surprised if any game hits over 10 gigs.

      I mean, let's have higher resolution FMV's! Crisp! Less artificing. But seriously, the game itself -- Do you suppose they'll ever make a 50 gigabyte PS3 game?

      I'm not denying that they will. Just being curious.

      • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)

        by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:03PM (#10321469) Homepage Journal

        I mean, let's have higher resolution FMV's! Crisp! Less artificing. But seriously, the game itself -- Do you suppose they'll ever make a 50 gigabyte PS3 game?

        It's not just about games. Once the Blu-Ray readers are more common and available for a few hundred bucks for your AV rack you'll see the push to re-buy the movies you've already bought on VHS and DVD.

        "Star Wars Special BluRay Edition in 300 channel THX certified blah blah blah" (and Greedo will still shoot first in that release)
      • I honestly have no idea, but the latest Final Fantasy games I've played (X and X-2) seem so well done and crafted, with tons of audio/video, I'd wager at least one company (SquareSoft, or is it SquareEnix now or some other name?) will make use of this extra added space.

        • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

          by geminidomino ( 614729 ) *
          As much as it made my skin crawl to see someone judge FF by X and X-2, I have to agree that SE will probably use a good part of this extra space. If I'm not mistaken (and I might well be) Star Ocean 3 (an Enix title) is the first US-released game to span more than one DVD.

      • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

        by British ( 51765 )
        Look on the bright side. With the next installment of Grand Theft Auto, they could have a larger library of tunes to play while you're driving around in Liberty/Vice City. beats mere 15 minute tracks per station like GTA3 had.

        Of course, they could just make some premium version of GTA that would use something like private shoutcast stations to stream radio stations and have virtually unlimited in-game music.

      • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

        by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:33PM (#10321838) Homepage
        A game that I worked on - Everquest: Champions of Norrath - used the entire dual-layer DVD. In fact, if we'd had more, we could have used it. In fact, we ended up having to remove some of the data for the international version because the voice files were too big to fit. I personally wrote a compression algorithm to compress our textures down to about half their previous size (and yes, they were compressed before also.)

        I think one level had around 10gb of textures uncompressed, brought down to under half a gig after heavy processing.

        That said, if we'd had access to a really fast processor and GPU, none of that would have been necessary. So I don't know what people can use 50gb for, given that the system is extremely fast.

        But maybe it's not as fast as I think it is.
        • I take it your algorithm was very lossy...

          BTW, Champions of Norrath was a great game. My wife and I played the hell out of it and enjoyed every minute of it.

          Where I think the blu-ray technology will be great is that you'll make it possible to add all kinds of extra stuff. Just imagine if this technology was available for Champions, how many extra levels, optional side quests, character classes, weapons, etc. that you could have added to game, while not having to compress the crap out of the textures and

          • Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)

            by ZorbaTHut ( 126196 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:59PM (#10322123) Homepage
            Very lossy. They "started" as 32-bit color, and, well, they're textures. They tend to be pretty monochromatic. It's amazing how many bits you can get rid of when your source is highly monochromatic. :) Every world texture in the game is compressed, and, well, how many texture artifacts did you see? :P

            (There are a few, but you have to kind of know what you're looking for - they look surprisingly like MPEG2 decoding artifacts, despite absolutely no similarity between the algorithms.)

            And thanks for the compliment ^^

            The problem with extra content is that somebody has to generate it and debug it. I mean, yeah, we would have loved to add tons of new character classes and weapons and levels and quests, but the fact is that spending twice as long making the game wouldn't have generated twice the sales. Even all the different colorings on the pieces of armor - I watched our artists wandering around the office for *days* with long reams of paper, doublechecking that every single armor color matched up properly (and boy did I not envy them, although I did the same thing with the minimaps, so there you have it.)

            Content, unfortunately, is surprisingly expensive to produce. :/

      • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Informative)

        by master_p ( 608214 )
        PS3 games will have so highly advanced graphics, that the textures alone will fill more than, let's say, 5 DVDs of today. With resolutions of 4096x4096 and more, and with multiple textures for each surface, the big space is really needed.

        And let's not forget the audio.

    • Re:I wonder (Score:3, Interesting)

      by vasqzr ( 619165 )
      Keep 10 copies of a game on the disc. Bad spot in one? read it from another copy of the game on the same disc.

      Or, maybe they'll start using some sort of caddy, much like when CDROM's first became used in PC's.

      Or, they'll use some 'space-age' technology where you can't scratch the disks.

    • Don't forget about the drives! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ProfessionalCookie ( 673314 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:22PM (#10321706) Journal
      While I'm mildly concerned about the discs what I'm really worried about is the drive.

      I've gone through 2 PS2 drives- the units function perfectly otherwise they just rarely load discs anymore. I'm sure there's plenty of people out there that this has happened to. I want to know if we're gonna get cheap drives that break every 8 months.

      I have the capacity to take care of the discs pretty well but all I can do with the drive is use it as intended.

      That said, yay for new tech adoption.
      • Yes, yes we are.

        Judging from the experiences of the gamers I know, the reason the PS2 is the most popular console is because EVERYBODY HAS TO BUY BLOODY THREE OF THEM!
        • I've had to buy two PS1s. The first was a 1998 model. This model worked quite well (well, it had the overheating problem ONCE) until it died in April 2001. This is probably due to the fact that it was on the carpet at the time when Sony specifically warns that you're not supposed to put it there, something I read in the manual to the PSOne I purchased a couple of days later.

          I recall hearing that Final Fantasy 8 killed a lot of older PS1s (probably first-gen ones), probably due the the fact that it pushed

  • Probably not this, anyone know ?

  • Now all we need... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ackthpt ( 218170 ) * on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:54PM (#10321326) Homepage Journal
    Now all we need is some decent games. It would be very cool if Sony would direct some of their lucre towards obtaining rights to M.U.L.E. and Mail Order Monsters and put them on this system.

    with all that storage they could make the planet Irata truly shine...

  • Fuzzy Logic. (Score:2, Funny)

    by Carik ( 205890 )
    Does anyone else keep reading "Blu-Ray" as "BluRry"?

  • backwards compatible (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Tante ( 814429 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:55PM (#10321343)
    Will this be compatible with all my PS2 games?

  • 54GB (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:55PM (#10321345)
    size of 54 GB, being an ideal medium to distribute next generation entertainment content from movies and music to computer applications.

    Yes, that allows a lot of bloat for computer applications. Windows anyone? Sorry.

    • Re:54GB (Score:2, Funny)

      by Paulrothrock ( 685079 )
      Just like AOL. Remember when that came on a floppy.

      And even if you didn't *want* AOL, at least you could reuse the floppy.

      </crotchety bastard>

    • Yes, that allows a lot of bloat for computer applications. Windows anyone? Sorry.

      It's not just Windows. I can't even get SuSE 9.1 Personal below 2 GB. For one thing, it likes to find very weird places to hide temp files permanently (does that make sense?)

      Disclaimer: SuSE is my favorite Linux distro

    • Re:54GB (Score:4, Funny)

      by Walt Dismal ( 534799 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:16PM (#10321624)
      Now I can stop worrying about archiving my pRoN collection.

    • Re:54GB (Score:3, Interesting)

      by prell ( 584580 )
      I was thinking: if you divide the amount of RAM available to the PS2 by the capacity of dual-layer DVDs, you get about 0.034. If you multiply 54 GB by 0.0034, you get ~183.60 MB. As impressive as 54 GB on a single disc sounds, it makes sense from a "scaling"/being-able-to-take-advantage-of perspective. Of course, if you consider the maximum size advertised in this article, which is 200 GB, you get 680.0 MB. What are the odds that the PS3 will have 512 MB of ram? 384?

  • Security by Obscurity? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LostCluster ( 625375 ) * on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:55PM (#10321354)
    Since most of us don't use this type of disc in our computers, and are unlikely to upgrade solely to copy videogame disks... could they be hoping on good old fashioned security by obscurity to be an extra hurdle against piracy?

    • Nope (Score:3, Informative)

      by Wesley Felter ( 138342 )
      Dude, Dell is supporting Blu-ray.
    • The extra hurdle is the fact that they hold 50+GB per disc. With recent crackdowns on bandwith hogs on Comcast with unknown boundaries and DSL ISPs setting known limits I see this as being the major deterrent to pirates.

      Now, of couse you can head over to your local Blockbuster and possibly burn the disc yourself from their copy (if it's possible) but I have a feeling that the media costs might not justify you doing that at least for several years.
      • That is EXACTLY the same argument I have been hearing for years and it is ALWAYS invalid. People said that cds would be uncopiable because people would not have the hard disk space, cd recorders are amazingly expensive, so is media, and it takes about a week on an unreliable connection to download a cd. Well, guess what, things moved on. Then came dvds. Exact same arguments. Now it's the same with a blue-ray or whatever it's called. With a 10Mbit connection, something entirely possible during the next 3-4 y
    • Why not? It will probably do nothing to stop professional pirates, but I'm sure it doesn't hurt.

    • Re:Security by Obscurity? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by nbert ( 785663 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:12PM (#10321584) Homepage Journal
      I wouldn't call it Obscurity, because this format is very well documented and Bluray writers are planned. But it definitely slows down piracy since those discs are more expensive (lowers pirates profit). It's also quite likely that the PS3 will come out before any affordable writers are out... so there won't be any illegal copies around for a certain timeframe...
      And even if piracy becomes a problem they will get an advantage in the next format war.

      IMO those factors played a higher role in their decision than enabling developers to create 54 GB games.

  • BD-RW (Score:3, Funny)

    by elcheesmo ( 646907 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:56PM (#10321359)
    I just want to know when I can get a BD-RW off of newegg.
  • Next month Sony plans to announce a 200GB 8-layer version of BD-ROM according to MacWorld."

    Today is November 5, 2006, and in today's news, angry video store owners with pitchforks are lined up in front of Sony's front doors.

    Kids will love these discs.

  • Purchase of MGM (Score:4, Insightful)

    by frankmu ( 68782 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:56PM (#10321366) Homepage
    this way Sony can push the PS3 effectively. the question is will they have enough Blue ray HD movies available by the time the PS3 is released.
    • Sony was a pretty big player in the content biz even before they had MGM... they bought out Columbia Tri-Star a few years ago and therefore own that movie archive as well as a handful TV series as recent as Dawson's Creek and the Donnie Osmond episodes of the Pyramid game show.

  • Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format (Score:5, Insightful)

    by goldspider ( 445116 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:56PM (#10321371) Homepage
    You all know it's coming, but seriously folks, before the Dreamcast and original Playstation came out, what console's games didn't come out on a proprietary format?

    • Re:Flaming Sony for Proprietary Format (Score:5, Informative)

      by magicsquid ( 85985 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:04PM (#10321475) Homepage
      The Dreamcast DID have a proprietary format. It was called the GD-Rom.

      The following explanation is courtesy of SkunkWorks [mozcom.com]

      The Sega Dreamcast GD-ROM system utilizes Oak Technology's OTI-9220 CD-ROM controller which is a single chip integration of Sony's "CXD-3005R" DSP/Servo control and Oak Technology's "OTI-912" CD-ROM decoder.

      So what does this mean? Sega had their "proprietary" GD-ROM system designed to use media with 2 times the capacity of CD-ROM discs, but with off-the-shelf CD-ROM components, and may have used a technique of running the spindle motor at half the speed required for CD-ROM's in reading 2x density GD-ROM discs-- tricking the pickup into believing it's reading off data from a CD-ROM disc at "x" (CAV) spindle rpm when it is actually reading a GD-ROM disc at "y" spindle rpm (x divided by 2=y). With same data read rates as with a CD-ROM disc running at twice it's rpm, the optical head, focus servo controls, signal processors, etc etc. aren't aware it's actually reading data off from a larger capacity medium. In other words, the GD-ROM disc is nothing more than a "passively accelerated" (tightly packed) CD-ROM disc, "decelerated" to emulate a CD-ROM by running the spindle motor at half the rpm!

    • That's not what worries me. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by mcc ( 14761 ) <amcclure@purdue.edu> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:06PM (#10321500) Homepage
      What worries me isn't the use of a proprietary Bluray-based storage format for the games of the Playstation 3 game console (which I personally plan to buy). What worries me is:
      1. Sony will be soon leveraging the Playstation 3 game console to push a proprietary Bluray-based video format they will be attempting to introduce at about the same time.
      2. Sony will be at about the same time attempting to leverage their upcoming PSP handheld game system to push another proprietary video format, this one based on Minidiscs, called UMD.
      Something within this I'm not so comfortable with. We're about to get a bona fide Betamax vs VHS style format war between HD-DVD and BluRay. I don't think it's going to be pretty. I'm glad I don't have plans to buy an HDTV.

      • Nothing to worry about (Score:4, Insightful)

        by mapmaker ( 140036 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @04:49PM (#10322726)
        Sony *always* goes for market domination on new electronics by trying to impose their proprietary format (Betamax, Memory Stick, Atrac) and they *always* fail. They *never* learn.

        Sony's like the Brain from Pinky and the Brain:

        "What are we going to do tonight Sony?"
        "The same thing we do every night, Pinky. Try to take over the home electronics business with a proprietary media format!"

    • You all know it's coming, but seriously folks, before the Dreamcast and original Playstation came out, what console's games didn't come out on a proprietary format?

      NEC PC Engine (the later version with the cd drive, of course - the one with the awesome Castlevania game - Akumajuo Dracula X - Chi no Rondo)

      Sega 32x was also standard CD-ROM, right? Sega Satuen? And what about Phillips CD-i? (if that even counts)

  • Blu-Ray Winning (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Kenshin ( 43036 ) <kenshin@lunarOPENBSDworks.ca minus bsd> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @02:59PM (#10321416) Homepage
    Personally, I see this as the action that will establish BD-ROM as the leader of the next-gen disc formats.

    I don't know many people who will rush-out to buy a new DVD player to play HD movies, but EVERYONE is going to buy a PS3.

    With that installed base, it will be fairly easy to translate into the market for movies being sold in that format.

    • Re:Blu-Ray Winning (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Damek ( 515688 )
      I won't be buying a PS3 (unless it has Doom III and Half-Life 2), but then I never bought a PS1 or PS2 or XBox or GameCube or anything else. I'm not in the market.

      But I also think it's too early for any new movie media standard. Sure, I'm an outlier, as demonstrated by what I just said about the PS3, but I just started getting some movies on DVD, and I imagine a good segment of the public only really got into DVD buying within the last few years. Even assuming 4-5 years before a new format is really ava

      • Re:Blu-Ray Winning (Score:3, Informative)

        by Etrigan_696 ( 192479 )
        First, let me start off by saying I own a small, independent video store in rural Kentucky, USA....
        So with that knowledge, comes this:

        Lots of the poorer people in America don't even have a DVD player YET!

        Quite a few movies are either no longer released on VHS, or the public release date for the VHS is a month or more later than the release date for the DVD.
        I can order movies on VHS from my distributor, but they are insanely expensive.
        Take the wretched "Bad Boys 2" for example. From my distributor, the DVD

    • Re:Blu-Ray Winning (Score:2, Insightful)

      by iezhy ( 623955 )
      Personally, I see this as the action that will establish BD-ROM as the leader of the next-gen disc formats

      sony already tried to establish MD (mini-disk) technology few years ago, which was a brilliant sollution for the time. Although, MD's were eaten by cheaper CD-R/RW's

      so its way to early to predict something - i guess the most affordable and widespread technology will win

  • Bluray has a 50GB capacity (Score:3, Insightful)

    by squeezee ( 599938 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:00PM (#10321421)
    What Ken Kutaragi appears to have said was that the PS3 will have 54GB of storage Capacity in addition to playing DVDs and CDs. Since Bluray can hold 25/50GB one assumes he is alluding to the inclusion of an onboard HDD or flash memory device.

    http://ps2.ign.com/articles/549/549950p1.html [ign.com]
  • With PlayStation, PlayStation 2 and PSP(TM) (PlayStation(R) Portable), SCEI will continue to expand the market and create a new world of computer entertainment. Have they made anything new for the PlayStation in the past 3 years? Or do they think making it smaller is a breakthrough.

  • if this is the case then I doubt ps3 in 05 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cyrax777 ( 633996 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:04PM (#10321474) Homepage
    Like people keep suggesting. More like late 06 early 07.

  • anti-piracy (Score:4, Funny)

    by alatesystems ( 51331 ) <.chris. .at. .chrisbenard.net.> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:04PM (#10321476) Homepage Journal
    If they really want to stop piracy, they should do what Sega did with the dreamcast, using a non-standard format, the gd-rom.

    It will be impossible for people to burn those other formats.

    Chris

  • MGM comes into the picture.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by voice of unreason ( 231784 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:05PM (#10321484)
    Interesting. I think I'm starting to see Sony's strategy. They're rolling out a console that can probably play blu-ray DVD movies. They recently bought MGM, giving Sony the rights to rerelease all of MGM's movies on DVD. With PS3 to put players into the market, and with MGM movies to release, it sounds like sony has put a lot of thought into making their blu-ray standard a success.

  • Big Deal (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LilMikey ( 615759 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:11PM (#10321565) Homepage
    Most PS2 and XBox games don't even use both layers of today's DVDs. The only one I recall encountering is Rallisport 2 and it was only like 6.5 gig or so. What this does seem likely to do is drive up the production cost of the games and system, however this probably won't translate to higher game prices as competition will even that field.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dark Paladin ( 116525 ) <jhummel.johnhummel@net> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:13PM (#10321593) Homepage
    Square-Enix can finally achieve the dream of turning Final Fantasy XIV into nothing more than a 50 hour movie with save spots in between!

    • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Funny)

      by miTTio ( 24893 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:30PM (#10321786)
      Namco beat them to it. Ever played Xenosaga [xenosaga.com]?
    • Maybe they'll get really ambitious and add a "Choose your own adventure" style game. at least all the plugs for cell-phones will be absolutely crisp & clear.

    • Re:Finally! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Zcipher ( 756241 )

      Actually, what I'd really like is for them to take that extra space and use it to include the original japanese voice acting. I cannot stress enough how much this would improve the game. Simply put, American voice actors are, with very few exceptions, terrible. As in, like a thousand needles in my spine. Restoring the original, non-awful voice acting would be the best use of additional space.

      • Re:Finally! (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Kiryat Malachi ( 177258 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @05:06PM (#10322966) Journal
        Personally, I like *understanding* the voice acting more than I like the Japanese voice acting. If I can't understand what they're saying, there's really no point in them saying it; give me BETTER VOICE ACTORS IN ENGLISH, not possibly better voice actors who I can't make a decent judgement on because I have no idea whether they're talking about their dead beloved or breakfast.

  • backing up will still take 50 disks (Score:5, Interesting)

    by davidwr ( 791652 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:15PM (#10321608) Homepage Journal
    In the days of 20MB hard disks, it took about 50 360KB floppies to back up a nearly-full disk, more or less.

    In the days of 40GB hard disks, it took 50 800MB CD-Rs.

    With 250GB systems, it takes about 50 4.7GB DVD-Rs.

    By the time 50-200GB burners are available for under $200 in 7-8 years, I'll probably be using 2.5-10TB systems at home, and the ratio will still be 50.

    I don't know about you, but 50 disk-swaps is several too many. Even with incremental or differential backups, it's a pain in the ***.

    Your disks-per-complete-backup ratio may not be 50 but it's probably fairly stable over time.

    • um... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Run4yourlives ( 716310 )
      that's why they have these things call tape...

      You actually back up your entire harddrive on 50 CDs/DVDS? Sorry, but that's just anal.

    • I don't know about you but if your time is worth anything buying another hard drive with firewire/usb case is actually cheaper than buying a DVD burner and taking the time to burn your backups. Consider for one second the price of each media and the time for each to burn, not to mention the sorting of your important vs non important data.

  • Sony to announce 8 layer 200 GB Blu-ray (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:15PM (#10321618)
    http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,117867,0 0.asp [pcworld.com]
  • Anyone know if there will be a Blue-Ray version of the DVD-RAM standard? I want something reliable to store my data.

    Damien
  • As long as they can improve load times, that shouldn't be a problem.
    The ps2 was absurd when it came to that and those games about a gig or so. I couldn't imagine waiting 5 minutes between levels.

  • PS3 Hard Disk Speculation (Score:3, Interesting)

    by blueZhift ( 652272 ) on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @03:50PM (#10322030) Homepage Journal
    By using such a high capacity read only storage medium, I wonder if this signals even less need for an internal hard drive for the PS3. If the console has enough system memory and/or available memory cards with fast enough read write access and fast throughput, then most games should be able to support updates/patches on the fly. If the memory cards really are up to it, then even a large RPG should be doable without need for a console HD. Most of the game world is going to be static so it can live on the read only disk. Updates for patches and special events are small diffs relative to the global data, so those reside on memory cards and loaded on the fly. Major expansions come on all new disks.

    What does this all mean? It means that the PS3 is even less likely to come out with a HD and by extension, the same can be said for Xbox 2 since it will likely use a disks of similar capacity (to keep up in the spec war). I'd expect to see memory cards for both boxes come in 128MB and 256MB flavors.

  • Maybe Sony should direct efforts elsewhere? (Score:3, Informative)

    by jbn-o ( 555068 ) <mail@digitalcitizen.info> on Wednesday September 22, 2004 @07:36PM (#10324624) Homepage
    Maybe Sony should just stop working on optical drives -- from my perspective, they have a very poor track record because they're way late to deliver interesting amounts of storage space and whatever they ship only works with proprietary formats.

    Put this in the context of a hard drive: Pricewatch says we can get a 400GB HD for a little over $1/GB right now (lower capacity hard drives offer faster rotation speed at less than $1/GB prices). Putting aside the price, these HDs currently deliver 4X the space of what Sony may deliver in 2007, and the hard drive will offer no proprietary hassles. I'm guessing that any HD will be faster to find what I want to read and faster to get the data to me than the upcoming Sony device.

    Perhaps their upcoming drive would be interesting if the specs for it and the compatible blank media were distributed to any competitors, thus letting the market turn this into the new low-end optical drive+media. But since Sony is probably not going to do that, I doubt the market will change to this new format.

    I recall a Sony CD-R replacement that offered slightly more space than a conventional CD-R, but only if you used their proprietary encoding scheme. The drive cost more than a conventional CD-R burner and the blank media would cost more than conventional CD-Rs as well. The press release came out and I knew nobody who was excited about it. It was obviously a bad exchange: initial hardware outlay would cost too much money, there was virtually no interoperability with one's friends, and any subsequent maintenance would cost too much (CD-R burners are about $20 and DVD burners are about $30 right now, by my skimming of Pricewatch).

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