Sony PS4 details – What’s still missing?

The Sony PS4 has been officially unveiled. It’s Sony’s next-generation console, and should have gamers across the land brimming full of excitement.

Except that a few seem to be pretty disappointed, because there are still a bucketload of PS4 details Sony has not revealed. Here are the most important ones.

Sony PS4 UK Release Date

Right at the end of the Sony PS4 launch conference, the console as confirmed to land in the 2013 “Holiday” season. For the non-Americans among you, that means around Christmas, possibly a bit before.

However, at this point we do not know which territories will get the console first – most important of course is whether the UK will be among the first wave. The US and Japan tend to get given precedence over our weedy little island.

Our best bet is that, like the PS3, the PS4 will slope into the UK after those territories – think early 2014 and you won’t be disappointed. Unless Sony announces a massive PS4 release date delay at E3 later this year, that is.

Sony PS4 Price

The Sony PS4 price was not mentioned during the console’s launch. It wasn’t so much brushed under the carpet as left standing out in the open like a trumpeting elephant, but completely ignored.

Some retailers have posted their own best-guess PS4 prices, but whether they’re anywhere near the mark is up for debate. Popular UK retailer Shopto.net has the Sony PS4 up for pre-order at £399.95. It’s likely that Shopto.net has gone for an upper estimate, to avoid shoppers cancelling should the actual price increase – a recent rumour suggested the PS4 would sell for around £300.

Sony PS4 What it Looks Like

Perhaps the most disappointing missing bit in the Sony PS4 launch was that we didn’t get a single glimpse of the actual console – the box with all the gubbins inside. All we saw hardware-wise were the PS4 controller and the PlayStation Eye box, which is roughly Sony’s latest take on Kinect.

All we have to go on at present are the raft of renders that have circulated the internet for months. And none of those are exactly reliable – being completely made up.

Of course, does it really matter what the PS3 looks like when it’ll be nestled under your TV? The pragmatic part of our brains says that it doesn’t, but we won’t deny the pang of disappointment at not seeing the real thing after watching a particularly long launch presentation.

Why has Sony held off? It’s likely that the final design hasn’t been decided-upon, and even if it has, Sony needs to hold off some goodies to unveil at E3 2013 in June.

Sony PS4 Eye – Is it Included?

The PS4 Eye is the Sony PS4’s alternative to Xbox’s Kinect sensor. It’s a bar that sits on top of your TV and features two cameras to let it calculate 3D spatial positioning of objects, as well as enable whizzy software doodads like face recognition.

However, we don’t know whether it will be included as standard with the Sony PS4, or if it is an optional accessory. Much like the Xbox Kinect, it’s likely to be offered as part of a slightly more expensive Sony PS4 bundle, as well as being available as a separate accessory. We’ll be back with clarification once Sony releases more details.

Sony PS4, will it support 4K output?

The next big revolution in TVs is 4K resolution, providing four times the number of pixels as the current standard, 1080p. Sony has not confirmed whether the PS4 will support either games in 4K, or 4K video output in general – for other media.

4G gaming seems unlikely, as the extra power needed to render all those pixels would limit the amount of texture, physics and procedural light processing the GPU could handle. However, given that the PS4 is expected to “last” for the best part of a decade, some form of 4K future-proofing needs to be in place.  

Have we missed something missing? Drop us a line in the comments.