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Consoles For Christmas 2008

Author Stuart Andrews
Published 14th Nov 2008
Consoles For Christmas 2008
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Finally, the tide turns in Sony's favour. If you're looking to do more than play games and you want to watch TV and movies, the PS3 is your best choice. Both consoles now support HDMI and 1080p outputs, and both will upscale your existing DVDs, but the PlayStation 3 adds Blu-ray playback and support for the Dolby TrueHD audio and Deep Colour features of HDMI 1.3 to the mix. Of course, you could argue that Blu-ray is a dead duck and that Microsoft has an HD movie download service already up and running in Europe (Sony has still to announce when we will get the PSN Movie Store over here). However, slow connection speeds and broadband download caps still make movie downloads a painful business for many of us. Blu-ray will be the most convenient approach to HD movie viewing for the near future at least.


What's more, the PlayStation 3 still makes a better living room, home entertainment system. Recent revisions have made the Xbox 360 quieter, but the PS3 is the less obtrusive console and its glossy all-black finish fits in better with a decent A/V system. Add the PlayTV peripheral and an external HDD and it can double as Freeview PVR, and its photo and music handling features are excellent. It might not be as well integrated with Windows media as the Microsoft console, but the PS3 interacts perfectly well with Windows Media Player and UPnP media servers, and it's also believed to be the next console to get BBC iPlayer support.


If you're an AV enthusiast or a movie buff, then, the extra cash for the PlayStation 3 is worth it. You're still getting an incredible games system, but you're also getting a fantastic HD media player for only £100 more than you'd spend on a stand-alone unit. Even if you don't consider yourself much of a gamer, that's money well spent.

Our choice: Sony PlayStation 3 80GB


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Latest 4 of 38 Comments

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comment hank said on 15th November 2008

@boomerang2

Check Forza2 out on the XBOX360 I was a Gran Turismo fan till this came along. Virtually going for free nowadays, not sure if a sequel is soon arriving b... more

comment ahlanalo said on 16th November 2008

@hank

Forza 2 is a great racing game, but it will never reach the quality of the physics and the visuals that GranTurismo prologue 5 have, and its confirmed that &qu... more

comment RichGtB said on 16th November 2008

@Steve/Darfuria

Too true, get home from work, hit sofa, hit the go button and your away.

Anyway, while all these consoles and PC hardware are all grea... more

comment Michael said on 24th November 2008

RitchGtb: "lol, yeah right, on a friday nite try getting 7 PC mates round with all their hardware, sleeping bags, get pizza dude etc on speeddial, get a chat server going and ... more

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