A PS3 price for PAL parts?

PS3 News | Less than AU$1,000/£400, suggests Sony executive.

Not all of the gaming news in the world revolves around America and Japan, yet given the recent avalanche of PS3 information, it's almost a surprise that we PAL types may now receive even more, especially before E3. However, Jeux France is reporting that a radio interview has taken place, and that a Sony executive has spilled some rather big beans.

George Fornay, the President of Sony Computer Entertainment France and Senior Vice-President of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe has not only confirmed a target European release in November but possibly a price as well. Given that we're using an internet translater and not our own lingual skills, we can only take this as something of an indicator. So what's the magic number? €500 or, at current rates, roughly AU$850 or £350.

This may not be the final number, but does at least give us an idea at the very least. If the price does end up being €500, then it's likely that the Australian and UK prices will be as above. The Xbox 360 prices are all equivalent in the PAL territories, so there is no reason not to believe that Sony won't play the same way. €500 was also earmarked by George as a point that may be considered expensive for a games console but cheap for a HD/Blu-Ray player.

AU$850 is better than a grand but the wait for November is still on, as is the wait for the final price.

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48 Comments

realitybites

5 years ago

HDMI is going to be the huge impediment. Not just the price.

Unless you have been hanging out till the last 3 months or so your LCD/Plasma is unlikely to have the right graphical interfaces.

They say HDMI is backwards compatible with DVI-D.

These guys have a cable if you have DVI-D.

http://www.extronelectronics.com/product/product.asp?id=dvithdca&subtype=188

Than maybe use one of these if you only have component available:

http://www.extronelectronics.com/product/product.asp?id=dvirgb100&subtype=187

The difficult part for myself is the HiDef box plugs into the DVI-D connector, DVD in component 1 and in the next few weeks Xbox 360 in the component 2 port.

Definitely going to take some black box magic to get it all set up.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

MrAndyPuppy wrote

20gb and as soon as you start up you discover you only have 13gb available.

Then after downloading a few of 500-1000Mb downloads you're under 10gb. It's easy to see where it all goes.

EXACTLY!!! 20 gig is sooo not enough! And when most of the games seem to have some sort of frame rate issues....trust me the developers could've done with more ram!

Qbert

5 years ago

And I thought the 360 has expensive! There's no way I'm paying over $500 for a console.

Like others have said, I think Nintendo and Microsoft will be happy with this price, but a high price was allways expected.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

Does everyone think this machine is gonna be a toy or something?!

I remember when Dvd recorders came out for your T.V...they were all over $1000. A lot of them still are around that price point and all they have are bigger hdd's.

PS3 is making a technical leap....it's basically ushering in the Blu-Ray era. Now how many Blu-Ray players are you gonna be able to buy for under $1000 when they first come out? One.....Playstation 3! And on top of that the machine will play the latest and greatest games, it will have a free online service, it will have a 60 gb hdd and it will have no region coding. All these things more than warrant the purchase price in my opinion. Serious tech heads will buy it....guaranteed. And if little kids don't pursuade their mommies to buy it for them chances are it won't be a problem cuz daddy will want one himself.

I'm buying it no matter what the cost! It's true next gen and it's what i'm waiting for!

What technical leap did the xbox 360 make?! I don't even think it made one! The Gamecube was able to do wireless in the last gen and even the original xbox was able to display certain games in 480 & 720p, aswell as support custom soundtracks....and these are the features the machine is boasting. Even the online service is exactly the same....I do admit it is a very good online service however and didn't really need changing.

It's more of a rip-off buying an xbox 360 in my opinion. Also the machine doesn't come out till November...if you can't save $1000 for it by then....well....then it sux to be you!

Qbert

5 years ago

Comparing the importance of Blu-Ray players to DVD players is wrong imo. First of all, we don't know if Blu-Ray player's will even take off and second, the jump from VHS to DVD was allmost a necessity. The jump from DVD to Blu-Ray is not.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

For tech-heads it is! I don't see any problems with it....so i'll be making the leap.

And I wasn't actually talking about the difference between VHS and DVD....I was actually talking about the difference between Dvd players and recorders.

Frozencry

5 years ago

I'm happy that it's not a grand, because if it was, I wouldn't buy it for a long time, and I know that many people would wait till it drops or something. I'll try save up for it on launch, but if I can't, I'll stick to my ps2, still has God of War 2 and Kingdom Hearts 2 going for it

(When the hell is KH2 coming out here anyway)

EvilHayama

5 years ago

ps3 looks to be the more feature-laden console, yeah, but it's not going to really effect me much with my SD TV and stereo speakers. All that's left after you take out HD is the online stuff (which the 360 and even Xbox have) and... blu-ray? It just holds more data, and even 360 games don't go more than one DVD yet.

Unless there's some unrevealed other use for a PS3 I see no reason to buy one till a killer game/games gets released.

Frozencry

5 years ago

I failed to read Ugh the boots post about technical leaps.

I agree that 360 didn't really make any leaps, but Ps3 also hasn't made anything huge either. There is Blu-Ray and the PhysX chip, but graphically it is basically what we have now. Both 360 and PS3 have Direct X9 shaders only, and by the end of this year we should be seeing games with higher technical caliber coming out, because of the release of Vista/Direct X10. Still though, it's not stopping me from buying PS3 for Killzone Ps3

Jellyfish

5 years ago

All three consoles are taking leaps... Revolution with it's different control style, the PS3 with Blu-Ray and Cell, Xbox 360 with it's three CPUs on one die, 48 multipurpose pipe GPU and embedded RAM.

By the way, you don't need HDMI to use the PS3 it has a multi-AV out like the Revolution and 360 as well as the dual HDMI ports. What people fail to take in is that even if the PS3 does use Blu-Ray for games... to watch Blu-Ray movies you MUST have a TV with HDMI ports. Of course this won't matter to Ugg or a couple of others, but for the mainstream it does.

For me I'm glad to see it's sub $1000, but we're yet to see how much the games cost.

Syb

5 years ago

[EDITED]

realitybites

5 years ago

nikack wrote

By the way, you don't need HDMI to use the PS3 it has a multi-AV out like the Revolution and 360 as well as the dual HDMI ports. What people fail to take in is that even if the PS3 does use Blu-Ray for games... to watch Blu-Ray movies you MUST have a TV with HDMI ports. Of course this won't matter to Ugg or a couple of others, but for the mainstream it does.
.

True there are other outputs but would you use them though if you "best" picture is going to be HDMI?

I've seen XBox 360 runing through composite you really may as well stay with current generation.

I have foxtel digital running through composite and it looks nothing like the HDTV on DVI-D.

If you have the setup (and cables) watch DVD on composite and than change it to component.

themak

5 years ago

Officialy:
DENIED.

This denial http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/04/06/sony_denies_ps3_price_range/ is here.

LeonJ

5 years ago

ugh the boot wrote

I got an xbox 360 and it's a rip! As if i'm gonna stream stuff thru the 360 when it's easier to do it with a pc. Also nearly all my devices plug into the output source directly, so there is no need to go thru another device. The only thing you can copy to the hdd are music files, everything else has to be streamed....how crap! And 20 gigs?! What is this an ipod?! It's a home console, what's wrong with a 60 - 80 gig hdd?! How about 1 gig of system ram also?! 500mgs for graphics and the other 500 for whatever else!

It's like an xbox with a graphics upgrade and a wireless controller.

What are you talking about? Streaming (wirelessly) is fantastic. I don't want any content on my 360, I would like to be able to stream music and video from my PC (where ALL my music/videos are) to my entertainment system. That and if you have a HD TV card in your PC, you can record and stream it to the 360 effortlessly. Media Center in fantastic and very simple.

But I guess if you have a one room setup it doesn't add anything.

RE - Graphics, have you seen GRAW in HD?

RE-RE - Have you played a game, turned on your on music and a friend dropped online to have a chat about nothing? To me, this is what next gen gaming should all be about. Customiszation city.

MrAndyPuppy

5 years ago

But streaming video is only available on Windows Media Center - if you only have XP you can only stream audio and pictures.

I have 3 Xboxes situated around the house, all networked into the main home network. All have XBMC and stream all the video we want from a central server with 1Tb of HDD space.

The X360 is for gaming.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

Oh yea I forgot to mention....Ps3 will have 2 video outputs! More possibilities there...

leonmc ~> yea I was referring to the 1 room setup...but that's a good point you make!

Yea i've seen GRAW in HD. Actually I saw it last night for the first time running at 720p on a 46" tv of a mates. Looked ok. The characters in the game are very static and look/feel very....well computer like. You can't see the soldiers breathing or any other natural movements. To me it's a shiner ghost recon! Nice lighting and particle effects but the game looked and felt so wooden....not impressed at all!

I digress....nintendo is for gaming.

MrAndyPuppy

5 years ago

Has the 2 video outs been a definite confirmation? They said it would last year, but I've also heard that they've now dropped that feature.

And realistically, how many people would use two and how?

plufim

5 years ago

Someone here mentioned the "region free" thing as being opne of the reasons they were looking forward to the PS3. I have to tell you, don't expect all games to be region free. See, the option will be there, as sony said, but most of the distributors will not go with that - they prefer to be able to do things their own way and set their own prices for each region. Ask anyone who works in the industry.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

Yea true but it's another feature it's touting..

I don't really know how I would use 2....if it's a novelty (e.g 2 tv's showing the same image) then I won't bother but if it's a required gameplay element (kinda like DS games) then I will. It's really up to the developers...imagine a game which uses the eye-toy peripheral for your stats screen and you can drag and drop items to equip etc.

I'm just saying there are more possibilities than with the xbox 360. Also I can't wait to start buying games from any region (except australia which has the stupid rating on it now and is way overpriced).

Xbox 360 is like upgrading your computer and the ps3 and rev are like buying new consoles, that's just the way it feels to me.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

plufim wrote

I think you might be referring to the 'translation' in games. All machines won't have a region meaning....any ps3 game can be played on any ps3.

MrAndyPuppy

5 years ago

Yeah, I heard that while the Xbox360 is able to be region locked on a per game basis, but PS3 will be completely region free.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

hey sorry for the double post...how do I delete one? Or can you mods please put those 2 together?

plufim

5 years ago

From an original question asked at GDC conference:

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=8637

Quote

A final, rather revealing question was asked by Gamasutra, to the effect of whether the PS3 would have regional lockouts. Harrison had mentioned that the console would support multiple display formats, and so we pressed him on whether all formats, from HD, to traditional displays, to PAL, SECAM and NTSC, would be supported out of box.

Harrison responded in a rather interesting way – “The things that make a console region free are different from what makes games region free.” Voltage differences, plug styles and that sort of thing mean that there will naturally be different SKUs for different regions. But at the same time, software will be region free. It’s possible for developers to enforce whatever encoding and format limitations they want. “If they want to divide it, that’s their choice. But the concept is that content is region free.”

That's a good article btw, there's some other interesting questions about user created content and such.

But publishers like the control they have. Most will not give it up so easily.

ugh the boot

5 years ago

^ Interesting. I'm actually a little confused now....

Looks like we'll just have to wait and see. In the meantime...i'll be happy with the 360.

"but the concept is that content is region free" What the hell does that mean!? It's like saying "the concept is HD but do whatever you want..." well that's a dumb concept then isn't it?!? Stupid Sony!

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