News Picks: January 31, 2007
Filed under: Media , News Picks , PlayStation 3 , Xbox 360
Poor Xbox 360 DVD Playback
Xbox-Scene mentioned an ExtremeTech article on the DVD playback quality of the Xbox 360; it was not good. Only once have I used the 360 for DVD playback. It was when my standalone player was having issues. The poor image quality of the DVD made it impossible to notice how well/poorly the 360 performed.
But it is disappointing to see how badly the 360 performs on standard DVDs. As the ExtremeTech article points out, the 360 has the horsepower to pull it off. You can see this based on reviews of the 360 managing the more taxing playback of HD content off of the HD DVD add-on player.
I would love to see ExtremeTech perform a similar review of both HD DVD and standard DVD playback on the 360's add-on player. Presumably the standard definition playback would be just as bad since the codec is likely the same.
With Microsoft pushing the 360 to be more than a game console, it is important for them to fix things like the DVD playback and the noise generated both by the fans and the DVD drive. Unfortunately, while the DVD playback can be fixed with a software patch, the noise requires new hardware.
PlayStation 3 Price Cuts
The past few days have seen continual chatter regarding a PlayStation 3 price cut this year. This comes after a magazine reported Sony's insistence otherwise. Even a modest cut would be a great psychological move. Hell a PS3 bundle with something like God of War II, a PS2 game, would cause a nice sales boost for Sony (though a cut in less than two months is unlikely).
What could be interesting is if Sony managed a price cut prior to Microsoft. While it is unlikely to have Sony end the year with more consoles in the market than Microsoft, it would put a damper on Xbox 360 sales ... at least until Halo 3 is released.
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