PS3: Rumour: PS4 to be announced on Feb 20. (teaser included)

[Chief]

Originally Posted by parso

PS1 = cd player
PS2 = dvd player
PS3 = blu ray player
PS4 = um blu ray player again......try selling that to the wife

Originally Posted by Schizo

Previous Sony consoles had additional incentive to be purchased at the time of release. The PS2 was just about the cheapest DVD player available at the time. The PS3 was just about the cheapest Blu-Ray player available at the time. It helped the consoles find their ways into homes that may not have necessarily had gaming consoles in them. People will try out some games, and you can easily turn some non-gamers into gamers just by virtue of having a box in the room that can play movies and also games.

I think the thing here is that physical media is less popular than it once was and as internet quality improves the more people turn to streaming content. I for one, don't know a single person who has bought a film on Blu-Ray.

I think their selling point to non gamers will be "why buy a media player, blu-ray player, DVR etc when you can have a device that does the lot, can stream content from a variety of sources including netflix, youtube etc or even your own hard drive or computer, lets you connect to facebook/twitter whatever in your own lounge, has videochat and, in the offchance you're interested, can play some videogames too."

[Drac]

I still find it hard to believe people bought a PS2/PS3 just for the disc player, at least I don't know anyone who did and I think those not interested in games would probably find such a device confusing as a media player. It was never in the media player section of stores so they'd have to know about games and go into the gaming section, thus probably really only purchased by gamers. Sure, a few might have read some Internet article about it and you probably had a handful of hifh/home-theater geeks doing it, but I doubt that counted for many sales. And wouldn't those kind of sales where the consumer isn't going to buy a bunch of games are actually bad for Sony if they console was really selling at a loss? They'd never re-coupe that money from those people though game purchases.

Also, I still see people at the local shopping centre buying DVDs out of those bright green vending machines, not old people either, like teenagers and people in their 20s.

I die a little inside every time I see it.

I still also think you're putting too much stock in 4K displays. On the desktop and devices where you do a lot of reading and you're quite close to the screen, high-resolution density is critical. I have an iPad 4, love it. But for TVs displaying motion-blended frames from 10ft away... utterly pointless for anything under 80 inches. Sure 4K sets look great in a store, when you're 1 foot away from the bloody thing , but put that in your lounge and sit back 10ft - now unless you have much better than 20/20 vision you literally won't see half the pixels any more.

Also, read these:

Why Ultra HD 4K TVs are still stupid | TV and Home Theater - CNET Reviews

^ Discusses the science of why it's rather pointless.

There’s no point in buying a 4K TV this year

^ Discusses the fact that even if you did get a 4K set, the only thing you could do with it is upscale 1080p blurays... Why are they selling 4K sets where there is no 4K media standard, not even for broadcast or download?

[Bawheidbob]

I had not even heard of 4k until folks started mentioning that PS4 would not have it for games.

I am basically blind anyway so it would not really matter to me.