Finally stepped into the High Definition television age. I got a Sony Bravia KDL-40W2000 LCD television and a Sony Playstation 3. The TV has a 1080p HD display and the PS3 has a Blu-Ray HD drive in it. As a bonus I get a games console in the Blu-Ray player for free 🙂 Here is a picture of the beasts in situ. The image on the screen is from a Mac mini that I use as my music centre with iTunes.
The quality of Blu-Ray movies via the PS3 and the TV is stunning. Very, very happy. I had to take the first PS3 back as the fans would come on and once they got to a high speed, whilst playing a game for example, they would stay at the high speed until the unit was switched off. This was irrespective of what the PS3 was doing after the fans speeded up. So if I left it idling the fans would never slow down again. This was annoying when using it to watch movies when in a quiet part of a film. You could hear the fans over the film sound. The replacement PS3 seems to be quieter but I’ve still to test it fully.
The game MotorStorm is stunning on the PS3. Really, really good fun as well. It outputs at 720p resolution and looks excellent on the Bravia. Here is a picture of a bike from the game. It has a bit of motion blur.
So I’ve cast my die into the Blu-Ray camp in the great HD-DVD vs. Blu-Ray face off. Hopefully Apple will go down the Blu-Ray route with their HD optical drives in Macintosh machines. A Mac mini with a Blu-Ray drive and a version of DVD Player that allowed playback of Blu-Ray movie discs would make a very nice media hub indeed. It’d need to output 1080p via HDMI cable though.