Hands-on: PS3 Slim as a Blu-ray playerWith its new US$300 price tag, the PS3 Slim has been selling like crazy, and the fact that it's an excellent Blu-ray player is at least part of the reason.Since Blu-ray's inception, the PS3 has been our reference Blu-ray player, only recently getting edged out of the top spot by the Oppo BDP-83. Now that the new 3.0 firmware has been released, we've had some time to put the PS3 Slim through our Blu-ray testing suite. The good Blu-ray performance Testing the image quality of the PlayStation 3 has always been a challenge, mainly because it does not deinterlace native 1080i content to 1080p at 60 frames per second. That means test discs specifically designed to assess Blu-ray image quality--like HQV, Spears and Munsil and Qdeo--aren't helpful. They all feature 1080i content and the PS3 just passes it along without processing. The PS3 Slim is no different in this regard. Not much Blu-ray content is available in 1080i, however, so this quirk of the PS3 isn't a huge problem in real-world scenarios. Without the comfort of our reliable test discs, we switched to our favorite challenging passages from actual program content. The kitchen scenes during Chapter 2 of Sunshine are often difficult for lesser players, but the PS3 Slim had no problem rendering the ridged cups or striped shirts. It also handled the end of Chapter 6 on Ghost Rider where we sometimes see moire in the grille of the RV on players with faulty 1080i deinterlacing. A couple of select scenes from Spider-Man 3 looked flawless as well. We also threw some less common content at the PS3 Slim. We looked at Watchmen: The Complete Motion Comic, and although we saw some jaggies, we're pretty sure it's in the source material; the same jaggies were present on the Oppo BDP-83. We saw the same thing on Seth MacFarlane's Cavalcade of Cartoon Comedy with both players having some minor jaggies that likely aren't the fault of the players. Although in our testing we saw virtually identical performance from both the PS3 Slim and the Oppo BDP-83, we'd still give the Oppo a tiny edge on Blu-ray playback because of its exceptional handling of rare content material. (See the Oppo BDP-83 review for more details.) Tags: 1080p, PS3 Slim, Sony Corp., disc, firmware |
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