After years of railing against consoles, I finally sold out and bought a Playstation 3. So far, I'm loving it.
It's great to finally be able to play Blu-ray discs. Bought the BBC's Planet Earth to start me off, and it looks absolutely fantastic.
The other massive plus is its ability to play back XviD-encoded video files downloaded from the net. We'll still buy missed episodes of TV shows from the iTunes store when we can, but now we can watch any shows we have to torrent on the TV instead of having to huddle round the computer. I even managed to get a hi-def download of Friday's episode of Battlestar Galactica playing back without too much trouble, with the help of TVersity.
The last thing I tried out, which is still the least important aspect of the PS3 to me, is its ability to play games. I decided to start out with one of the highest-rated PS3 games released so far, the oddly-named Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. It's a lot of fun. Getting used to the controller took a little time, but to its credit, while I've been playing the game I haven't found myself missing a mouse and keyboard. I still don't see myself buying many games for it, not least because they're around $20 more expensive than PC games. But for those titles that don't get released for the PC, or where I can't bring myself to wait, it'll be good to have the option.
I wasn't really bothered about the PS3's ability to display photos, already being able to do that with the Apple TV. But it turns out that the PS3 is better at it. The blandly-named "Portrait" mode randomly pans across or zooms into or out of each picture as it displays it, in a similar fashion to the Apple TV's "Ken Burns effect". The PS3 does a much better job, however, intelligently identifying the points of interest and using them as the start of end points of the pan or zoom.
All round, a worthwhile purchase. If anyone is thinking of picking one up in Bermuda, Leisure Time is the best place to go for the 40GB model. They're $70 cheaper than Electronics City, and only a little more expensive than from Amazon.com, once you've paid the duty and shipping. The games seem relatively reasonably priced there too. PTech apparently only carry the 80GB model, which at $900 seems way overpriced.
