Reasons to Buy the Sony PS3

To say that the Playstation 3 is a pricey prospect would be an understatement. In most regions, the purchase of two systems, one from each of Sony’s chief Playstation 3 competition, could be made for the cost of a single Playstation 3. Where a premium version of the Playstation 3 costs $600 in the United States and even more in Japan (the equivalent of $630), both the Nintendo Wii and Microsoft Xbox 360 could be had. November 11 saw the release of the system in Japan and the 17^th in the United States and Canada.

March 2007 will be the street date for Oceana (Australia and New Zealand), Europe and other world regions as it concerns the Playstation 3, all for premium prices. With that dynamic in place, it’s entirely possible that consumers from those regions will up the bidding on consoles purchased in Japan or North American and put up for online auction. Importing solves the problem of waiting four months and that shortened wait time is no doubt worth quite a bit of money to some consumers in those regions.

Spending that money takes no small amount of motivation, so what comes with the Playstation 3 may go a long way towards prompting consumers in any reason to plunk down the significant wad of cash it will take to land a console.

High Definition Entertainment

With its much-publicized Blu-ray player on board and the ability to render high definition graphics for games and other media, the Playstation 3 is clearly the console of the next generation with the biggest high definition offering. With the backing of Sony, Blu-ray could gain steam through its inclusion in the Playstation 3, eventually rendering both DVDs and HD-DVDs (Blu-ray’s chief competition) useless. With more space for data than HD-DVD disks and an immense surplus of space for data over conventional DVDs, developers can cram more content into each disk, or at least that’s the hope Sony harbors for its touted technology.

Playstation Network

Sony’s answer to the Xbox Live platform is the Playstation Network Platform, an online collection of games, entertainment and other social services designed to provide a sense of community to the Playstation 3’s immense hardware capabilities. Unlike the Xbox Live platform, the PNP service will be free, enabling multiplayer online gaming for each and every Playstation 3 consumer. While billing processes may be installed for particular games such as massively multiplayer games of all genres, that cost is left up to the realm of developers. At launch, Playstation and Playstation 2 games will available for download (much like Nintendo’s Virtual Console and Microsoft’s Xbox Live), as will loads of multimedia content.

Sheer Horsepower

The money involved in buying a Playstation 3 does not even cover the cost of manufacturing the system. Some estimate Sony’s cost of producing the Playstation 3 at $800 and all of that money has to go somewhere. The system’s processor takes on parallel processing techniques to enable multiple processes handled through a single processor. Software developers can make use of this trait to take on a wide variety of in-game processing tasks in an efficient manner. That kind of process is common in the high-end computing industry and Sony has built it into a consumer-oriented device, the Playstation 3. At launch, the console will have an immense amount of processing power, equal to that of some of the very high-end gaming rigs available in the PC gaming world, a significant accomplishment for a console years in the making. That is not typically the case in a world where computing power advances at such a rapid rate that mass-produced devices like video game consoles are often quickly surpassed. The fact that the Playstation 3 will launch with such a bleeding-edge processing profile is a testament to Sony’s foresight and development efforts.

With those three traits at the forefront, the Playstation 3 presents quite a formidable argument for purchase. As far as those consumers facing launches in their regions far in the future, the options might be limited. Though it may be technically possible to import a system from another region, those regions will be high on demand while low on supply. Preorders both in the United States and Japan have had to be pulled due to high demand, setting up a potential frenzy of activity on the console’s actual launch. The best advice? Good luck.

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