I really liked the japanese ps3's, the phat ones were white and looked VERY damn stylish. i'll be getting myself a 3rd ps3 (got a original 60gb which i replaced with a 250 gb in my basement, my brother has a 80gb, and we'll be getting a slim for our family room so we can have blue-ray when we get our new 1080p compatible tv as our 60 inch rear projection has HD, but not 1080 )
I'll probably get one for the following reasons: Lower power usage Proper HD audio (unlike the phat down-mixing) Quieter (hard to do I know) The 40GB we have has a Blu-Ray drive that's about to give up and die for a second time as evident by the heavy seeking noises it's making.
I might well get one. PS3 was always the console I was looking at. It would also annoy my brother who is an XBox fanboi. Win-win.
Seriously considering it now that it's been streamlined. I've already told the GF that we need one. Well we are going to a wedding later this year which everybody gets a blu-ray of the event and we don't have a blu ray player to play it on Oddly enough, the lack of backwards compatibility also means my PS2 isn't out of date lol.
OK can I dispell some myths about the 'proper' HD audio on the slim, please? The ps3 phat does not downmix, downsample, or otherwise impair DTS-MA and DD-HD. It decodes the soundtrack to PCM and passes that to your receiver, as long as you are using HDMI. This is not a problem unless it's doing it wrong, and the PS3 does it properly. If you aren't using HDMI, well that's a moot issue because you can only get HD audio over HDMI - optical cable doesn't have the bandwidth for even bitstreaming the lossless codecs, so you're limited to DTS Core and vanilla AC3. What the PS3 is doing is akin to sending the WAV of a FLAC file rather than the FLAC file directly - the resulting waveforms are identical! The only benefit of the slim is that it sends the bitstream, so the lights on your receiver will light up. This is _the only_ perceptible difference in the way the ps3 slim handles BD audio! The confusion arising here is that PC BD player software DOES downsample the PCM track to slightly better than DVD quality when sending a decoded bitstream as PCM - this is because PC implementations of HDMI are seriously backwards right now, and nobody is implementing HDCP PAP correctly. Somehow this has resulted in the idea that "if it's not bitstreaming, it's not awesome" being applied outside of the PC world. The bottom line: If you have a PS3 connected via HDMI to a receiver capable of receiving 24bit/96khz multichannel PCM (basically every HDMI equipped receiver does this), you are receiving a qualitatively identical AV experience to a PS3 Slim connected to a receiver capable of DTS-MA/DD-TruHD bitstream decoding. So don't buy a ps3 slim if the only reason you're doing so is for 'better' audio - it truly isn't, unless your ego is that important that you need to see the DTS MA light on your receiver. (I will, however, be trading mine in if only because it's not costing money to upgrade and the lower power consumption is a draw...)
I know someone that is actually "trading up" for this reason and none other, despite me explaining the situation as you have done above I must admit, that given the choice I'd rather use bitstream than LPCM just to see "DTS HD MASTER" rather than "MULTI CH" on my receiver, but I'm not trading out my fat PS3 for the privilege.
It appears there is noise issue with some units, a high pitched electrical hiss that people with acute hearing pick up. Mine has gradually decreased although I'm sure there is more fan noise now. Looks like it's pot-luck if you get a quiet one.
i got a slim today, it's rather nice piece'o'kit, still waiting for the HDTV to be delivered tomorrow it actually looks better than on the pictures and functionally barely differs from phat ps3s, so unless you want HDMI-CEC (I did) i think you could get a phat PS3 and get some games thrown in for the price
iirc only a few games support DTS properly, when i played GT5 it was dolbi dig (iirc) but when i dropped burnout paradise in it went OH HAI YOU CAN HAZ DTS! you have no idea how ****ing incredible an experiance burnout paradise is with DTS
Socom Confrontation has DTS but for some reason on my sound system everything seems backwards so I dont use it.
Because DTS and DD are to DTS-MA and DD-HD what mp3 is to FLAC (and very low bitrate mp3 at that). The new codecs are losslessly compressed versions of the original studio master soundtrack, and they sound _awesome_.
I'm planning on trading in my 60Gb launch model for the lower power consumption, larger HDD (for when the movie store opens) and slightly smaller size. Reading the article on Eurogamer about PS3 and 360 failure rates and the cost of repairing a PS3 it looks like it might be a good time to replace it. My PS3 sits on top of my Sky+ and it gets rather toasty!
