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Summary:
Can the PS3 perform competitively with stand-alone Blu-ray players from consumer electronics makers? PC World's Melissa J. Perenson weighs in with the full review.


Full Text:
by Melissa J. Perenson

From the outset, Sony has considered the PlayStation 3 an all-around entertainment console, with tendrils that extend well beyond the realm of game play. Perhaps chief among these is its support for the Blu-ray Disc format, which lets you play high-definition movies. But can the PS3 perform competitively with stand-alone Blu-ray players from consumer electronics makers?

The short answer is yes. In my initial hands-on tests, the PS3's Blu-ray Disc playback was very good--even better than I'd anticipated. (If you're impatient to read my first impressions of the PS3's image quality for Blu-ray Discs, skip ahead to "Sublime Video," past the interface discussion.) However, this is not an unqualified endorsement; in fact, I found several drawbacks that may give audio-visual enthusiasts pause.

PS3 Movie Theater
The PS3's movie playback experience is best if you start from scratch, inserting a disc into the front-loading slot as soon as you power up the unit. It took just 3 seconds for our Underworld Evolution disc to physically load into the unit itself, followed almost immediately by the PlayStation 3 startup music. The screen then blacked out, and the movie came up on screen. Total elapsed time from disc insertion to the start of the program (in this case, Sony Pictures Home Entertainment's opening splash screen) was a respectable 24 seconds.

If you want to play a movie with the PS3 unit already on, the experience differs. You insert the disc and wait for something to happen, except nothing happens. The issue--one of several that keep the PS3 from being a killer Blu-ray Disc player--is that, if already turned on, the machine does not automatically start the movie disc. Furthermore, after detecting the presence of the BD-ROM, the PS3 doesn't automatically highlight that new video option so that you can select it, let alone properly identify the BD-ROM movie on the disc--as Black Hawk Down or The Phantom of the Opera, for example.

Instead, the newly inserted BD-ROM appears as an option above the Video menu index (in contrast with the other video content that we had loaded on the PS3's hard drive, which appears below the Video menu listing). You have to manually select the BD-ROM by scrolling up to that spot, and then select it by pressing the X button on the controller. The movie disc is still not identified by name, only as a BD-ROM.

Once I had the movie loaded, I discovered the next irksome hurdle to using the PS3 as a home entertainment console. Since it doesn't come with a separate remote control for video playback, I had to use the game controller to navigate through movies, and that required two hands.

Two-handed navigation for entertainment players is not unheard of--several high-end remote controls from Harmony, Philips, and others require two hands--but it is unusual, and certainly a departure from the more commonplace and ergonomic single-handed clicker. I adapted to the PS3 controller, but ultimately, though elegant for game play, it proved kludgy as a BD remote. Using two hands to control basic functions like play, fast forward, and rewind was both ungainly and imprecise; I missed not having dedicated buttons for such common features.

Sony says a dedicated remote control will be available in December for $25. (I'll post some thoughts on our blog when I have a chance to try the remote control.) The decision to leave the remote out of the PS3's bundle seems chintzy and odd to me, especially given that Sony is positioning the premium-priced PS3 as an all-purpose entertainment device. After all, Microsoft includes a remote with the premium bundle of the competing Xbox 360. (Sony does include a Blu-ray movie, the Will Farrell hit Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, with the first 500,000 systems--another clear indicator of the company's positioning of the PS3 as a Blu-ray player, too.)

Nonetheless, even with the added cost of the remote, the high-end PS3 still costs significantly less than stand-alone BD players, which range in price from $899 for the Philips BDP9000 to $1500 for the forthcoming Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1. If you buy the high-end PS3 with the remote, you'll spend about $625 (the standard console costs $100 less), making the PS3 an attractive option for high-def movie playback.

Navigation Experimentation
To navigate up, down, left, or right within the disc menus, you can use either the PS3 controller's directional pad or the left analog stick controller. You press X to select options and to activate play. The O button lets you exit the BD player, the square button brings up the disc's pop-up menu, and the triangle button gives you a handy, transparent-overlay on-screen menu that pops up on the left side of the screen. This menu provides quick access to certain settings, and awkward access to dedicated software-based playback controls (for example, buttons for fast forward, rewind, play, and stop)--which you need since the game controller lacks such dedicated controls.

Trying to perform certain operations, such as precise fast-forwarding, was particularly frustrating. The fast-forward steps ahead at 1.5X, 10X, 30X, and 120X, and you must press the X button to cease moving forward. Stepping forward frame by frame is even more awkward: No option clearly exists for this, but you can press the controller's X button to pause playback and then use the analog stick or the right and left arrows on the directional pad to advance a frame at a time.

Unfortunately, you'll have to experiment to figure all this out: The manual included with our PlayStation 3 provided no clues on how to use the controller's buttons for movie navigation. I had to dope out the responses via trial and error, and frequently found several paths to the same operation. This could be either confusing or convenient, depending on your perspective and on how comfortable you are using the controller to navigate the interface.

Inside the BD Player
In spite of these nits, the PS3's Blu-ray Disc movie player proved highly satisfactory in many ways.

I popped multiple Blu-ray Disc movies into the player and found that I liked the relatively quick speed with which it loaded and navigated through discs. I encountered a few noticeable pauses while switching between far-flung chapters on a disc, but no interminable hourglasses or annoying waits like the ones I experienced with the Samsung BD-P1000. The PS3 can resume playback; I discovered, though, that if I exited the player app to do something else on the PS3 before reselecting the BD movie, there was an obvious lag before play started up again.

I found the pop-up info display elegantly designed--unobtrusive, yet easily readable. (The easiest--if not the only--path to this display: Press the Select button in the middle of the controller.) It's a good thing that the display is a pleasure to read, because you'll be invoking it a lot: The pop-up is the only way to figure out where you are in the disc, since the PlayStation 3 console lacks an LCD screen such as those commonly found on DVD and dedicated Blu-ray Disc players. Personally, I prefer having an LCD on my player that I can glance at to see how many minutes remain, but the PS3's approach does have an advantage: In dark environments, you won't be distracted by a glowing LCD.

The display shows plenty of information about a given disc. On the top row you see the audio codec, including how many channels of sound, the sample frequency in kHz, and the bit rate. Comparable information is displayed for video (the video codec and bit rate). The bottom row displays the disc's title number and chapter number, the time elapsed, and the total time, with a meter that shows where you currently are on the disc relative to the total playing time.