Originally posted by: Koing
UMD = lots of storage for portable gaming and people can buy movies on it if they wish.
What other portable system has a 'vast' amount of memory space for a portable console? It is great imo.
PS3 Blue Ray will just give the game plenty of room. If no one takes it up fine, no biggie. Like the PS2 it gave consumers a cheap DVD option or a DVD option for another room.
Sony SO better not screw up the PS3 'online service'! XBox Live from what little I have used around a friends house seems GREAT :thumbsup: to MS for that.
Koing
UMD is Sony's grab at having their own proprietary format steal the portable market. The movies are overpriced, have lower resolution than standard definition television, come with no extras and drain the PSP battery in about 2.5 hours. It's an OK storage medium for games, but really, it's nothing more than a Gamecube disk in a plastic shell.
BluRay is, as with practically *everything* Sony, overhyped, misunderstood and not nearly as fabulous as they'd love you to believe. For starters, they've managed to get the single layer manufacturing tech pretty stable, so that's 25GB. Not bad, to be sure, but they never quote 25 GB in any kind of press releases or otherwise, they claim 50. Trouble is, they haven't demonstrated a stable manufacturing process for dual layer or beyond. Yeah, it may get there eventually, but so far it's NOT there, yet they keep acting as if it were.
Second, it's SLOW. A 1X BD-ROM, which is likely what PS3 will have, runs at about the speed of a 36X CDROM drive, which is roughly equivelent to a 4X DVD. Expect slower loading times on PS3 vs 360.
Third, it's so far *irrelevant* for gaming. Even the largest games have yet to take up a full DVD-9 yet, much less more than that. GTA:SA, which everyone cites as being so huge, fits on a *single layer* DVD. The install for the PC version--which has much higher resolution assets than the PS2 version--is 3.9GB on DVD and 4.3GB installed. While texture sizes will certainly go up significantly, model sizes probably will not. 3D Models are, after all, just simple ASCII text files full of coordinates and UV Mapping data. They aren't real huge to begin with.
BluRay, much like UMD, is nothing more than a power-grab by Sony, an attempt to grab both the emerging portable movie market and the home HD movie market by the balls so that *every* content provider distributing *any* movie, whether portable or for home, has to pay a royalty fee to Sony. Don't forget, too, that in the BluRay spec, players must be connected to the internet so they can validate the authenticity of the media being played back. Welcome back, Divx!
Jason