CES 2006 - Day 3: Playstation 3, Quarter-size Hard Drives, SED and lots of TVs
by Anand Lal Shimpi & Manveer Wasson on January 9, 2006 1:25 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
Playstation 3 at CES
The closest you could get to a Playstation 3 at CES was behind a revolving glass case that showed off the unit in all three colors (silver, white and black).
The design doesn't seem to have changed at all since we first saw it back at E3.
It's not too surprising to see that Sony now explicitly mentions that the controller is a conceptual design only, given the incredible amount of backlash its unveiling generated.
A video very similar to what was played at E3 was running nearby, but nothing in the video particularly caught our eye as something new.
The one demo that was new however was a Blu-ray demonstration using the PS3. The demo was of software decoded Blu-ray playback driven by the PS3's Cell processor. However the content was MPEG-2 encoded and not H.264, which means that the task of decoding is not nearly as CPU intensive as it could be. One thing we have been very curious about is how well the PS3's Cell processor will be able to handle full bitrate H.264 decoding. Without a doubt NVIDIA's RSX GPU will offload some of the decoding, however it remains to be seen if Cell is enough to decode a full 40Mbps Blu-ray stream without dropping frames.
To put things in perspective, NVIDIA told us that with their current H.264 decode acceleration coupled with the fastest CPUs today they can handle around a 25Mbps H.264 stream.
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Sunbird - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
No problem for me here. IE6 on WinXP SP2.Aquila76 - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
Hmm... I wonder if my account is experiencing the 'y2k6 bug' that wiped out some of the lifers.semo - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
some lifers accounts got wiped out?y2k6 bug?
man i should stop living under this stupid rock. soooo much hilarity.
Aquila76 - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
dwell, SampSon, buck and a few others got wiped out last week - all their posts got wiped too.ukDave - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
Last word in 2nd last paragraph on pg14."comarpsion" should be "comparison".
Word.
Calin - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
Why they compare the quality of digital TV seen on a shiny new digital TV to the quality on a 1980's analog TV? Why not compare to the latest analog only TV they built?Probably because the quality difference would be underwhelming?
Calin
psychobriggsy - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
If I read what that digital TV 'convertor' box did, then they have been available in the UK (and probably other European countries) for around 4 years already, initially as the ITV Digital boxes, and for the past couple of years as Freeview boxes.They usually have two SCART (Eurotel) outputs (what we have instead of S-Video outputs, ours can carry RGB signals as well as composite, but the connector is pig-large), one to the TV, another to a recorder, and an RF output in case the TV is old and doesn't have SCART inputs.
Cheap models (<£40) skimp of course, or 'specialise' in not having some of the features like RF output of digital signals. They also lose the 7 day program guide and only offer Now&Next, grrr.
Regardless, it should mean that these boxes will cost under $99 when they're released in the US, probably around $79. If they try it on with $199 then you know they're trying to rip you off, unless it downconverts terrestrial HD signals too.
semo - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
good point. how many ppl have tvs from the 1980s anymore (as far as the targeted audience of ces is concerned)Sc4freak - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
Is it just me, or is the entire page completely screwed up?gsellis - Monday, January 9, 2006 - link
I noticed that the index and pages were one off.