Sony brass defends lack of features on low-end PS3

Sony is getting attention at E3, all right. It's just not the kind of …

Most gamers were looking forward to this year's E3 for two reasons: getting the specs, pricing, and release dates for Sony and Nintendo's next-generation consoles, and seeing titles for the PS3 and Wii in action. Both companies came through to an extent. Although we don't have an exact release date or price for the Nintendo Wii, we know it will be here by year end and it will be cheaper than the competition.

Sony, on the other hand, has given us all we need to know about the PlayStation 3, and as a result, is spending much of its energy at E3 fighting off detractors of the PS3's two-console lineup. In particular, Sony is getting a lot of hate for the cheaper PS3 model. As a refresher, the US$499 model comes with a 20GB hard drive and lacks some of the features of its more-expensive sibling. In particular, there's no digital output of any kind, just plain old analog A/V ports.

Kaz Hirai, CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment of America is defending the low-end model, which also lacks the memory card reader and 802.11b/g capability of the US$599 model.

"We felt that if you want to save something on your Memory Stick, most people have those readers on their PC, which is easily adaptable to the PlayStation 3 with a USB cord."

Given the high manufacturing cost of the PS3, it's understandable that Sony needs to shave costs where it can. However, the assertion that most people have a memory card reader for their PC is questionable. Many folks still rely on USB cables to move data from a digital camera to a computer.

The bigger head-scratcher is Sony's decision to not support any sort of digital video out on the cheaper (relatively speaking, of course) console. Hirai says that's no big deal.


That's a debatable assertion at best.

Take a stroll through the aisle of your local big box consumer electronics retailer. A good proportion—if not an outright majority—of the HDTVs for sale there have HDMI ports. Even if most people currently do not have HDMI-capable displays, they will at some point. Then they will be stuck with an expensive console and Blu-ray player without an HDMI port. And people who have just dropped two large on a big-screen HDTV are not going to watch digital content piped in over an analog connection.

Equally troubling is the issue of the Image Constraint Token (ICT), which we touched on in our write-up of the official PS3 announcement. ICT is part of the spec for both Blu-ray and HD DVD. It works by "sniffing" the output to see if it's travelling down a protected path (e.g., HDMI). If it's not, the beautiful HD content can be degraded from HD to standard definition levels, or somewhere in between.

Currently, the two studios that have made a decision on ICT have decided against using it for the time being. That's because they don't want to alienate owners of older, analog-only HDTV sets and give consumers another disincentive to purchase expensive next-generation optical disc players. Given the longer-term vision of the motion picture industry of having all of its content locked down all of the time, trusting that studios will resist the temptation to use ICT seems to be a fool's proposition. After all, that's the very purpose it was designed for.

When posed with questions about ICT and whether some PS3 owners won't be able to watch Blu-ray movies in high-def, Hirai was evasive, saying that it is "too early to speculate at this point." People who are debating dropping US$500 plus tax on a PS3 beg to differ. It also goes against Sony's stated intent to tie together what it described as the "three elements of the HD value chain"—the display, content, and hardware—that SCE Worldwide Studios President Phil Harrison talked about last last year. It appears that the lower-priced PS3 has a missing link in the chain and unlike the Xbox 360 Core System, it's not one that can be easily remedied with a hardware add-on.

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