A new PS3 Slim
Yep my parents have gone all Blu-ray with the purchase of a 250Gb model PS3 slim; still the best Blu-ray player out there at that price point and does so much more too. Well at least it would if I could set-up the bloody wireless connection.
What fun behind their television, took out the scart lead connecting their VCR to the Freeview box, the aerial lead, the power lead; then the scart lead and power lead to the DVD and then just added the HDMI cable and the power lead to the PS3; much tidier.
Of course the PS3 didn't auto-switch inputs on start-up until I told it to output via HDMI; um excuse me what the hell do you think you're outputting at the moment ;-)
Went through the language and user name malarky then tried to connect it to the router. Oh it found it all right but would it connect with the WPA key, course not. Doesn't help that the PS3 treats it as a password and thus asterisks it out as you type it in. Certainly not helped as it's hexadecimal and uppercase, and changing the case on the in-built keyboard also shifts the numbers to !"£$ etc. so you have to keep shifting back and forth.
Gave up in the end; I'll try it this weekend by turning the security off; if it can't connect then I'll check it's not some sort of router protection restriction.
Anyway continued on and tied the remote control to it; that was a piece of cake - tell the PS3 to look for it and hold down the Home and Start buttons at the same time until it says it's connected. After that it works just like a normal controller, but with labelled and dedicated buttons to perform disc functions.
Also made sure the CEC control between the TV and the PS3 was on; which means they can use the TV remote's disc function buttons to control the PS3 if need be.
Stuck in Star Trek to test it, and hey it loads faster than both my dedicated player and my old PS3; bastards. Also auto-switches to the right input; only took Sony until, what, the fourth model to add a feature that was available and should have been included with the first one.
Next up I'll load their photos onto the drive and loan my mother a copy of Burnout Paradise so she can crash things, heh.
So anyway they're happy and they get to watch both DVDs and Blu-ray on their shiny HD set.
7 comments:
I couldn't help noticing that the menu on my new BluRay player looks suspiciously like my sister's PS3. (Well, it is a Sony BluRay player.)
I also couldn't help noticing that while the TV consistently fails to watch to the BT Vision input, the old DVD Player or the VHS automatically, it seems to somehow magically switch to the BluRay player every single time, and never cuts parts of the picture off the screen. Tell me, why don't all HDMI signals do this?!
Yeah Sony are trying to standardise on the XMB interface so all new products have this.
As for HDMI tell me about it in terms of control the CEC (Consumer Electronics Control) system has been in place since version 1.0 and the wiring to control it is mandatory in order to conform with the HDMI spec.
However the actual hardware in the products to run the system isn't mandatory and this is how the original PS3 models got left out.
To put it in non-jargon the bits that allow the equipment to talk to the television are mandatory, but the bits that do the talking aren't.
And cutting the edges off the picture? I thought HDMI was supposed to be digital? Presumably that means that the receiving equipment must know what the actual dimensions of the image are?! So why do I get edges cut off or incorrect aspect ratios unless I manually prod buttons on the TV? What is that about?!
Ah yes sorry, that's the TV (and possibly the player).
First off there's the overscan. By default TV's tend to proportionally stretch the picture to hide any 'noise' that appears top and/or bottom of a signal, obviously this also trims the sides too.
For 4:3 or 21:9 ratio either the TV or the player may attempt to make it fit the screen by stretching making it look odd.
Now for the HDMI input on your Samsung TV with that input active head into the menu and picture options and select a size of "Just Scan" this is the don't mess with the ratio just display it setting.
If you haven't altered the settings on the player it should play 4:3 etc. as that.
But yes you'd expect it to just do that, but as we both know some people are odd and like their 'fat' 4:3 pictures and don't even know about overscan.
Don't even get me started on the whole “why are all the new TVs 16:9 aspect when 99.98% of all video signals are 4:3 aspect and isn't this just a huge waste money to let you have black bars around the picture or a distorted image?”
As I say, with the new BluRay player, it all seems to just work. You know, like you'd expect a modern system to do.
Oh it gets better, not counting UltraHD (7680 × 4320) the latest move is into 21:9 screen televisions so as to match cinema ratios.
I'm reminded of that review from ZP. You know, the one that goes
“So has it worked? In short, no. In long, noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.”
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