You hit the nail right on the head there cahaz ! :nod: I 100% agree with what you say. That's why I WON'T buy a Sony electronic item such as MP3 Player, Camera, DVD/TV/etc because I can't use my accessories from other formats with them. I must buy bloody memory sticks ore use their software. They even did it with the original playstation PSU cord. They said using a Saturn one or any other general one that works on ANY SYSTEM would damage the PlayStation for one reason or another. I think it had something to do with some foil in their cable. Anyway, this resulted in you being forced to buy their official cable for twice the price of any standard power cord cable. As for the whole MD thing, I never liked Sony's players (design wise) but I love Sharp's design and build quality ! Can't go wrong with a Sharp item. Here is my 1997 Sharp MD recorder that still works perfectly to this day !! I use it all the time as a mic input (use for mixing my voiceovers with game audio on Retro Core) as well as a MD player connected to the PC's audio out. The rechargeable battery still works as well but only for 2 hours now Nice option is that it's 100 Volts to 240 volts compatible meaning I can plug it in anywhere ! Features all the recording gizmos you'd ever need plus fantastic audio playback. Guaranteed if this was a Sony it would have been dead long ago. Oh yes, this has been dropped God knows how many times. Yakumo
I think the main point with the MD format is NOT that it wasn't a good format, but that it did not fill much of a need or a void in the industry. It was too expensive for most people to justify using it as a recorder, and there were few commercial releases. I only have Pearl Jam's "Ten". Secondly, I agree with many of you on this board that Sony will pay for their arrogance. PSP- expensive formats, expensive games, demand is diminished PS3- expensive production, difficult machine to code, you can make the mistake once (PS2), but consumers expect a low quality product the second time around. I know my first PS2 broke, and now I use the Slim. Blue-Ray- Why not just call it Beta-Ray? 1,800 for a player, 1,200 more than HD? Consumers aren't THAT excited about buying new DVD players.
Honestly I'm amazed at the PSP failure to beat the crap out of the DS. Is like if the board of sony were all nintendo secret agents and were crippling the PSP from the inside. I say this becos some of the decisions coming from sony are so stupid and suicidal that it looks like if they want the PSP fails miserably. About the MD, well it was great when it was released back in the 91/92, and it was good for most of the 90s, but if there something that keep it from reaching success was sony itself. Just like today with the PSP is sony's greed that destroy any good ideas that come from the company. I'm kinda pissed about the PSP, becos when it was released it seemed that at last we would have a decent portable that wasnt obsolete from the start (like the GBC for example) and now with the shadow of failure over the system the only thing that matters to other executives is if someone could defeat nintendo's portables. Honestly I think that the PSP may be able to defeat the DS when this one starts to show some age (specially in the graphics) but nintendo could release a new system. And let's not forget that the PS2 looks obsolete for quite some time, and that didnt help Xbox sales numbers.
I'm going to jump on the MD love bandwagon here - what an awesome device. I got mine, one of the first NetMD models from Sony, about five years ago, and it's still running strong despite being dropped or sat on uncountable numbers of times. That and my PSX, going on eight years old, certainly are a testament to what Sony's build quality used to be. The MD software, however, is another matter. The OpenMG Jukebox/SonicStage software is absolutely abysmal, prone to freezing, crashing, not transferring files properly, and randomly choosing to mark various files as not being DRM-compatable. Transferring music to a MD is such a ridiculous pain, as it involves burning a CD image in Nero, mounting it in DaemonTools, and then burning to MD with the MD Simple Burner software, which unlike SonicStage is a stable and functional piece of code.
i dont really think sony is trying to compete with nintendo, but with apple. no one needs a sony walkman, diskman, or watchman when they have an ipod. if you want an idea where sony is taking the psp look at apple... and *cough* vongo.
Right now psp is gaining strenth in japan due to ds shortages, in america people are buying mostly treating it as sorta a stylish thing thats expensive. Baiscily the casual crowd that buys ps2 stuff is buying this in the U.S. mostly. However i doubt that the psp will really be successful at all. Alot of developers are trying to use it for ports or compilations like capcom is doing, games that are stripped down versions of their console brothers, rarely are there games that are very orignal and really worth droping the 250 down. I feel that the psps biggest mistakes are cost, and formats used. I mean i was amazed at the power when i saw it, but i mean for dev to really support it takes at least a small ps2 and already that is expensive enough. As for the umd movies, i think from the start sony should of just bundled them with dvd releases, but even then that idea is already a bit late.
I very vividly remember the battle between the Gameboy and the Gamegear, and this current handheld war is very reminiscent. I remember the consensus among all my friends was that the Gamegear was "better", and maybe it was, but I always contended that my Gameboy had the games I actually wanted to play. Now no one can claim that the Gamegear, whilst being more "cool" than the Gameboy, made much of a mark in gaming history with it's Genesis ports and soulless franchises. I remember how blurry and unplayable those Sonic games were. No one really cares about extra functions. Remember the Gamegear TV tuner? Were kids across America watching gamegears? NO. Do the masses really want to take the time to download, convert, and transfer videos to their PSP? No. Then there was the Lynx, Turbo Express, the gamate, and we knew their fates were sealed before they even hit the shelves. Similarly, we had the Gizmondo, the N-Gage, and the Zodiac. It's the games, always will be.
Yeah, it's a J-Phone screen cleaner. The staff at Vodafone gave it to me since they are no longer called or use the name J-Phone anymore. Yakumo
question: Can someone give me a side by side comparison on UMD vs. DVD image/sound quality, storage space, etc... I wonder with the advent of HD and Blue-Ray why Sony would flood the market with an uncompetitive format. They had to know it was doomed. Are we as the consumers missing something here? And where the hell did they come up with the Universal part? It certainly isn't universal on hardware. Sure, it's universal as to what kind of media can be put on it, but it can't be re-written, so universal must refer to movies and games. They would have been better off inviting record companies to make UMD music disks with videos and extras. I could justify buying a new album for all those features, if it was reasonably priced, but movies, no.
Just off the top of my head: DVD: 720x480 8.5GB (Dual Layer) MPEG-2 UMD: 480x272 (Full PSP resolution) 1.8GB (Dual Layer) MPEG4/h.264
The problem of the UMD is the same that the Click! had: too late and too crippled. Both formats were expensive, low and came in a time were flash memory was already inexpensive enough. For those who dont know what the Click! was, is a small magnetic disk created by Iomega (of Zip fame) They wanted it to be used as some short of replacement for the aging casettes when the first MP3 players came to market. The problem is that it had just a few megs of capacity, and it was kinda expensive. The drop in the price of CF and SC killed the thing.
I still wonder who the dumbass was in Sony who pushed for this thing. They could have used a smaller, uncased disc or proprietary cards like the DS (which would have made it smaller). I can't believe the movie production companies went for this. I always laugh when I see a commercial and it says, "for DVD and PSP". They must be deathly terrified of piracy. The GBA had it, the DS has a little of it, but the homebrew community makes up for that loss. Sony, however, has tried everything to keep the hackers and homebrewers out. Big mistake methinks. I can't wait to see if Blue-Ray really is better than HD. While we're on the topic of boneheaded moves, what the hell is Microsoft thinking with this external HD-DVD player? Why not just buy a standalone HD-DVD player? seriously, is this a Supergrafx with cd-rom attachment? There's no reason that the 360 should not have had HD-DVD compatibility right out of the box. I'm calling rush job on this one.
Yes, their is. HD-DVD players are expensive, very expensive. If it had been part of the system MS would have lost bucketloads of money on every system sold, far more then they ever did with the original XBox. Even for a company like them that has money to burn their has to be limits.
If the resolution was higher, then even with only 1.8gb of space an efficient MPEG-4/h.264 codec should be equal to 8gb of MPEG-2. Not that it matters, given that you're watching it on such a small screen anyway. The reason Sony haven't been pushing a stand-alone player is because it would offer nothing to most consumers.
The PS3 will not cost much more than the XBOX 360, yet it will be a blue-ray player. Why release the 360 if it can't "compete" with the PS3 in terms of next-generation media abilities, especially with the impending war on formats. This time Nintendo may have it right by staying out of the mess.
Why do people keep going on about the PS3 being difficult to program for, as if it was the only one? The XBox 360 is only slightly easier to code for and the main issue developers are having ATM on both consoles is threading their code and learning to program for multi-core, especially when it comes to things like AI which is not easily threaded using traditional routines. It's better than VHS, I think? At least in NTSC. They're not designed for homeviewing anyway, they are a portable format designed for a small scale widescreen. Deciding UMD is dead at this stage is crazy. Once the PSP drops in price it will go mass consumer and then UMDs will start selling again, especially if their price goes down too. The average consumer likes to own physical things, rather than bytes on a memory stick and will probably want to watch movies on the go once they buy one, especially on the PSP screen. UMD is easy to use and durable. The Sony hate thing is getting pretty old. Sure, it has its negative points, but innovation is a good thing because it pushes the market forward. Sony likes to keep its inventions to itself, but it makes the competition form their own solutions, so everyone benefits.
Why do people keep reading old news, the fourth rev of PS3 dev kits are out, and ive heard nothing but good things, and how easy it is to program for. This has been also noticed on many blogs of people whom are working on PS3 titles as we speak.
Hmmm, I think the Ipod Video among other things has pretty killed those chances. There are twice as many kids at my high school that have Ipod videos compared to those that have PSP's and the ones that do have PSP's are often trying to flog them. At the end of the day the consumer is not going to pay atleast twice as much for a movie just because it comes on a disc. UMD is done for movies an it isn't going to come back...
