$600 PS3 Ships Without HDMI Cable

Eurogamer reports that the $600 PS3, which comes available with an HDMI port, will not ship with the necessary cable to actually hook the machine up. From the article: "According to the specs page on the official US PS3 website, which notes: 'HDMI cable not included. Additional equipment may be required to use the HDMI connector.' Sony has long promoted the 60GB PS3's HDMI output as a key feature of the machine. The 20GB model, however, doesn't feature HDMI - and nor does the Xbox 360, as it goes, despite occasional rumours of a hardware revision in the offing." The machine will, of course, come with a composite cable.

This is not news.

[casualsax3]

First, the PS2, Xbox, AND Gamecube all had HD cables sold as add ons. Second - why would Sony ship every PS3 which HDMI cables, when such a tiny percentage of homes even have HDMI ready TV's. HDMI cables are only going to run you $20 anyway: http://www.ramelectronics.net/html/DVI-hdmi_cables .html#std [ramelectronics.net]

If you've got $600 to drop on a PS3, you've got another $20 for cables. Move along, nothing to see here.

HDMI for HDCP

[varunnangia]

IIRC, HDMI cables are necessary if you need to view HDCP encrypted content - or you get a "low-quality" version of the image. Considering that most studios are not using the image constraint token till 2010 [slashdot.org], it seems that HDMI cable or no, no one's likely to need it for a while. Should it be included in a $600 package and is Sony cheaping out? Perhaps. But do you absolutely need it right now? No.

Re:This is not news.

[ravenshrike]

Future compatibility. As the price comes down, more HDTVs with HDMI capability will be sold, thereby creating a market.

Re:'Cuz a cable costs $100...

[gabebear]

Ya, but Circuit City's $125 cable [circuitcity.com] is the same thing as the discount $6 cable [outletpc.com] in this case. If sony just releases a reasonably priced cable($30) and sells it next to the PS3 then they will make a couple extra million on HDMI cables.

Re:Proprietary connector?

[Sinryc]

Ahem... WRONG! The regular nintendo has the red and yello plug ins so you can use a normal wire there.

Re:This is not news.

[casualsax3]

Apparently you've never taken a look at a luxury sports car. Let's take the Porsche Cayman for example: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yRs6oMlyfK8 [youtube.com]

This is a review from Top Gear: it's a great clip, however for the point I'm trying to make is about one third of the way in - check out . Things you would consider essentials on a sports car - the sports chrono package (500 pounds), 19" wheels (1260 pounds), fade free carbon ceramic breaks (5350 pounds!), an adaptive dampers (1030 pounds), the SatNav is an extra 1800 pounds - even the rear windshield wiper is an extra 260 pounds. This, all on a car that's already over 50,000 pounds. Tell me again why people are getting bent out of shape here - it's a cheap $20 cable that 5% of PS3 owners are going to want/need - you can't even begin to compare that to a $400 rear windshield wiper that every single person who owned the car (especially in the UK) is going to want AND need.

Oblig. Xbox 360 Note

[Stonesand]

FWIW, the Premium version of the 360 comes with the highest-end cable: it has component out, composite out, and optical out. A really great cable! :)

Re:Oh noes!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Does the 360 ship with a component cable?"

Yes it does, My Sony Fanboi. And its also $100 cheaper. Any more questions?

Re:Pinch Those Pennies! Ouch!

[be-fan]

To be fair, the word "digital" should be used carefully in such situations. Digital != Bit-Accurate, as geeks tend to assume. Digital protocols often to include error correction layers, but that is not necessarily the case. DVI, the underlying protocol for HDMI, does not include any error correction, at all. It's more resistant to errors due to noise, because its uses differential signaling, but its not immune to bit-errors. Thus, given DVI's relatively high sigaling rate (165 MHz), cable quality might be an issue with very long runs.

It should also be noted that the traditional "digital" signals people like to argue over, for example SPDIF, also include no error correction whatsoever.

That is not to say that there is any merit in oxygen-free copper for HDMI cables, but rather that the world is a lot more complex than knee-jerkers on both sides of this particular argument realize.

Re:Pinch Those Pennies! Ouch!

[0rbit4l]

Have you checked out svideo.com [svideo.com] for HDMI cables? I don't work for them or anything - just a happy customer. I got a 6' cable that works just fine with my 1080i/720p set and my Toshiba DVD player for less than $20 shipped to my house. Paying extra money for digital cables is stupid beyond belief.

Re:Bastards!

[stupidfoo]

Your argument is lame.

99% of the time items that produce video signals come with the cables, items that receive said signals do not. This is just the way the market seems to have worked things out.

My $400 Xbox 360 came with a nice set of component cables. Have fun with your $15 cable. I'm sure the quality is just stellar.

Re:Bastards!

[GoodOmens]

I bought a $21 cable from blue jeans cable. The specs are the same as monster cable ..... Check their cable spec pdf's if you don't believe it. Its nice, thick and has gold plated connectors. Anyone who is into high end audio/video will tell you Monster sucks. Just check the cables of a "real" pro install (IE paying a decent company to hook your equipment up) and see what they use ....

Re:Bastards!

[GoodOmens]

Cable quality does matter even if it is digital. On very long runs a "1" can get rounded down to a "0" due to signal degration. The better the quality of the cable the longer you can go. I'm not defending Monster by any lenght. They do make nice cables; however you can find the same thing for about 1/4th the cost else where.

Re:Blu-Ray curse

[Anonymous Coward]

Reports coming out of the PS3 launch developers indicate that they actually are using the extra space available, above and beyond the 9 gigs that a DVD gets you, to store high resolution textures, more sound effects, etc.

Just because developers are using the extra space doesn't mean that they had to use the extra space or that it was a good idea to use the space.

If you're using MPEG 2 encoding on 1080p cutscenes you will rapidly run out of space on a standard DVD, if you cut the resolution down to 1080i or 720p and/or encode using a better compression algorithm (DivX for example) you will produce a cut scene at a level of detail which few of your users will notice a difference at a fraction of the storage requirements (probably 10%). Thus they didn't need Blu-Ray.

Also, if you noticed in the Previous Generation the Gamecube had far shorter loading times then either the PS2 or XBox on average; there are two main reasons for this: loading times were shorter in part because the Gamecube development kit emulated the ammount of time required to read from disc ensuring it would be noticed by game developers, but the main reason was that (with the smaller disc size) most textures had to be compressed to fit onto a Gamecube disc (thus drastically reducing the quantity of data that had to be loaded). In contrast many (if not most) PS2 games had uncompressed textures because the developer could obtain better graphical performance from the PS2 that way and as a result had long loading times (sometimes in excess of 1 minute). So using more space may not be a good idea.

Re:My Dryer

[Bassman59]

Big deal. The dryer that came with my washing machine didn't even come with a POWER CABLE! How freakin' stupid is that??

The mains connection for your dryer may vary with local code requirements. Putting four moderately-expensive cables in with the appliance to cover all of the bases doesn't make any sense.

-a

Re:No component video?

[nateman1352]

OK here is the difference between HDMI and Component video. Both are able to trasmit HDTV signals up to the 1080 resolutions. The only difference between 1080i and 1080p is that one is interlaced and one is progressive.

What interlacing means in the context of video is that each frame transmitted is actually only half an image. The frame contains every other line of the entire picture. The next frame after this contains the lines that the previous one did not. Back in the 60s when color analog TVs where being designed, they built them to refresh only the lines that data was received for when drawing the current frame, leaving the previous frame still on the screen, filling in the lines that were not received with the current frame. The advantage of this is that you effectively double your screen resolution without using any additional bandwidth. Progessive on the other hand simply means redrawing the screen completely every frame, which is how computer monitors work.

Generally we consider interalacing to be a bad thing these days, since recent HDTV's natively use a progressive method for refreshing the screen (i.e. They don't use electron guns that can draw half of the screen at a time.) Becausse of this, in order to display an interlaced signal on a progressive, the signal must first be deinterlaced. Deinterlacing is *VERY* complicated, because you can't just take two frames and combine them into one, since despite containing only half an image, each frame still represents a different point in time hence any movement on the screen between the two time shoots will look very wierd using this method. Most of the time deinterlacing mechanisms these days are not very well made because of the difficulty.

Component takes advantage of interlacing to get from 720p to 1080i (again the same amount of bandwidth can be used to transmit a double resolution image.) Whereas HDMI is pretty much DVI with the following additions: Audio is sent with video and a method for encryption exists to prevent you from recording images off the cable (DRM basically.) Most modern HDTVs will be able to handle both.

Re:This is not news.

[Anonymous Coward]

most serious gamers will want/need HDMI and blu-ray support.

The fundalmental flaw in your position is that HDMI is equivalent to HDTV. Only the latest HDTVs have HDMI. I guess you have missed the other posts on Slashdot of early adopters of HDTV lamenting the fact that their TV's do NOT have HDMI connectors. If the objective is to connect to as many HDTV presently out in homes the cable that maximizes that is component, not HDMI.

In two or three years it would be a dumb idea not to include the cable (at that point the number of HDMI tvs should far outnumber the number of HDTV without it). However, for this initial distribution run, there is isn't motivation.

Re:Pinch Those Pennies! Ouch!

[timster]

While what you say is basically true, I should note that bit errors in a digital signal are different in nature from signal loss inherent to analog signals. Loss of data in an analog signal is perceived as a loss of clarity, contrast, etc whereas a significant rate of bit errors in a digital signal would be perceived as more obvious noise (flashes of snow, etc).

People buy expensive cables hoping for an improved visual experience, and in the case of digital signals they aren't likely to see a difference unless they are noticing a specific problem with the cheap cable.

Re:Blu-Ray curse

[danpsmith]

$600 also buys you wi-fi, a 60 Gb harddrive, 512Mb, a multi-core processor all of which combine to give you a games console, multimedia and internet system that sits under your TV.

Yep! And enough DRM to not use any of it properly!

Re:Bastards!

[fujiman]

One time, at my friends house, he had a really short length of digital cable and a really strong signal, and the 1s were being rounded up to 2s!

Digital doesn't guarantee delivery

[LionMage]

It's a digital signal. It gets there... or it doesn't. That's it. You don't need a $300 Monster Cable to do that!

Not 100% accurate, as HDMI (which uses DVI signaling for the video portion) does not have any error correction built into the signaling [ecoustics.com]. (See also the bottom of this page [ramelectronics.net] for similar info.)

This means that bit errors can creep in and degrade image quality when using low-quality cables, especially in an electrically noisy environment. I don't know about you, but I have a rat's nest of cables behind my AV rack; even with cable management, some cross-talk is unavoidable because of the sheer number of cables in close proximity.

Poor shielding is only one problem with cheap cables, though; you also have issues with improper termination (i.e., poor impedance matching) at the ends of the cable, something that makes a huge difference at the frequencies that DVI/HDMI operates at.