Sunday 12 December 2010

The Ultimate PS2

While it is a kosher Sony product, Sony is keeping tight-lipped about the telly and wouldn't give us any details because the company is "not 'actively' pushing the item". We know the feeling: we've lost count of the days we've spent trying not to talk about something that seemed like a fantastic idea the night before...

"It's so ... black!" said Ford Prefect, "you can hardly make out its shape ... light just seems to fall into it!"

Zaphod said nothing. He had simply fallen in love.

The blackness of it was so extreme that it was almost impossible to tell how close you were standing to it.

"Your eyes just slide off it ..." said Ford in wonder. It was an emotional moment. He bit his lip.

Zaphod moved forward to it, slowly, like a man possessed - or more accurately like a man who wanted to possess. His hand reached out to stroke it. His hand stopped. His hand reached out to stroke it again. His hand stopped again.

"Come and feel the surface," he said in a hushed voice.

Ford put his hand out to feel it. His hand stopped.

"You ... you can't ..." he said.

"See?" said Zaphod, "it's just totally frictionless. This must be one mother of a mover ..."

He turned to look at Ford seriously. At least, one of his heads did - the other stayed gazing in awe at the ship.

"What do you reckon, Ford?" he said.

"You mean ... er ..." Ford looked over his shoulder. "You mean stroll off with it? You think we should?"

"No."

"Nor do I."

"But we're going to, aren't we?"

"How can we not?"

6 comments:

  1. not sure how i could review this, sure i could spew forth a bunch of numbers and resolutions and input configurations, but that would be meaningless, this thing has soul. how can you quantify that? this is the PS2s swan song, and what a song it is!

    the quality of the picture is everything you'd expect from a screen running the Bravia Engine 3, it has a whole bunch of tuning options and auto adjusters to play with, it'll take a 1080p input and full DTS 5.1 in it's stride over HDMI and look loverly.

    initial set-up was pretty straight forward, it tunes digital tv/cable then analogue, and if you jacked it with an ethernet cable (or via wi-fi dongle) it sets that up too to receive IPTV, there's a bunch of internet options available from the sets XMB, yepp, just like the PS3s but running film rental stuff like Qriocity (sp?) Love Film, You Tube, RSS feeds, Podcast etc etc.

    plug a USB stick into the side port and it'll play your music, pictures and films too, it is even DIVX compatible. I have set WMP 11 up as a server to it but have yet to get anywhere figuring out how to get the set to see my netbook. better read the manual at some point :)

    The base of the unit is a sleek PS2 with a sliding drive cover, this is only turned on when you wish it, nice just to hit a button on the remote and have it fire up and auto display. Speaking of which you can still use the XMB while playing PS2 games, something the PS3 never mastered. The PS2 also has it's own ethernet, if you can find a online game server still working, good for LAN still, it has 2 memory card and joypad ports as well as the 2 front USB ports. I'm guessing from the layout it's a PS2 Slim board under the plastic.

    Another feature is the favorites button, this brings up a new menu bar which displays folders etc tagged by yourself, it also shows recently watched/listened to stuff as well as a nifty feature of recomended, my TV seems to think i'd like nothing more than Dave and Quest so far *smiles*

    Been using my PS3 on it over the weekend and have to say it performed beautifully. The image quality puts my big HDTV to shame. It has some smart zoom options which i'll try out using my PSP+Component cable at one point.

    Overall, for a set that costs around the same as other big name brands of the same size i can't see how you'd go wrong with this, plus you get a PS2 in the base.

    ps: when you turn it on, it displays the word SONY in the middle of the screen and plays a few notes, nice.

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  2. My missus would kill me if I got one, but damn I'm tempted. I would stick it in my daughters room, she's got my launch day PS2 (takes a few goes to recognise discs) and a crappy old CRT TV. We've already got all her Xmas stuff, so I can't be spoiling her. If it was a slightly bigger screen my resistance would kick in and I'd be ordering, damn the consequences!

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  3. Looks awesome Tone - thanks for the review. I'm also jealous of your freesat HD box - want one of those too!

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  4. you should see the size of my Sat' dish! no silly ex-Sky leftovers for me, got a 3ft wide monster with multi output HD LMB.

    Picked the FreeHD box up at that tech/trade show i went to a while back, got it for 1/2 RRP. works a treat.

    ps: PS3 got 4OD and ITVplayer under Tv icon

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  5. So pretty.. I want one, the div-x from usb is a bonus, didn't realise it did films as well as pics/mps3. Might have to get one when I get back from Australia and I can spend without guilt again.

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  6. ah, I've been waiting for the 4OD and ITVPlayer channels! They're here? Nice!

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