By Audrey Sternberg
The PS3 will finally arrive in Europe in March!
It will ship with a 2x Blu-ray disc drive, read-only as is the case with most game console optical drives. However, given the high price at which it will be sold, you would have thought that this brand new Blu-ray technology would have a recorder included… but as we all know, you can never assume anything!
Blu-ray has been touted as the successor to DVD. It can store more information on the same surface thanks to a new type of blue-violet laser. Blu-Ray can hold 50Gb in its double layer version versus 8Gb for a standard DVD double layer.
Then Toshiba announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas its new 51Gb HD DVD-ROM triple layer, which allows 7 hours of HD video.
Upping the ante, TDK responded with a 200Gb Blu-ray (6 layers on 33.3Gb) allowing 18 hours of HD video – enough to store every season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on it! ;-)
Clearly, war between these technologies has been declared!
With all these new announcements, maybe we should bide our time before choosing one drive over another. Although we’ll probably have to do as we have always done with games for consoles: buy the one that fits the player we own. Unfortunately, format convergence still looks to be a long way off...
And sometimes there are forces at work that us poor punters only find out about after the fact… For instance, this is what UK gossip service Popbitch had to say about this particular war:
“Back in the 80s when there were two competing video technologies, VHS triumphed over Betamax largely because Sony, who owned Betamax, refused to allow their format to be used by the porn industry. Hence VHS became the industry standard.
There's a TV format war brewing again - HD DVDs versus Blu-ray. Sony own Blu-ray and, guess what, they don't seem to want porn on this system either, having backed out of a deal with adult film studio Digital Playground. HD-DVD is easier to produce anyway, so the porn industry is 100% behind this format. PS3 uses Blu-ray, so there is some hope for Sony, but we're still sticking our money on HD-DVD.”
Still, for me, the fact remains that if the PS3 had a Blu-ray recorder inside, I wouldn’t think twice about buying it as soon as it is available in France.
(Though of course, hackers have already succeeded in cracking both Blu-ray and HD DVD copyright protection. C’est la vie…!)
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