I’ve been toying with the idea of buying a PS3 for a little while and I finally went through it this past weekend. Having worked on a few launch titles for both the Xbox 360 and the PS3 I’ve built up a pretty strong bias against the Sony console, and for a few good reasons. Despite that, it’s been a while since it was released and I figured that it’d be a safe purchase now, and with the death of HD-DVD the Bluray player was a big draw as well.
What I was hoping to do was pick up the 80gb PS3 bundle that comes with Metal Gear Solid 4 and a Dualshock 3 controller, but apparently Sony only shipped about 5 of these units because they were sold out everywhere I checked. Not only that, but nobody had the 80gb plain system either, and I was told that Sony is no longer shipping them. Awesome. When I really thought about it I realized that I didn’t actually care about backwards compatibility, and since I had no other choice anyway, I went with the 40gb model. I picked up a copy of MGS4 and Call of Duty 4 as well.
When I got home I unpacked everything and started hooking things up. I didn’t need the component video cable which was included with the console because my friend Jon had hooked me up with an HDMI cable a few months back and I was glad to finally be able to use the stupid thing. As I was hooking everything up I thought to myself, “Awesome, now I can actually see stuff in 1080p” and then I turned everything on and it worked perfectly. Just kidding. Setting my PS3 to output in 1080p causes my display to go black for 30 seconds before the console defaults back to 1080i.
I actually ran into this problem before with my Xbox 360, which after a firmware update was supposed to be able to output 1080p, but my TV wouldn’t take it and I attributed this to the fact that I was using a component video connection. So much for HDMI. So now I’m left wondering what the hell is going on. Is it my TV? I hope not. The term “1080p” is plastered all over the damned thing, and about every other word in the instruction manual is “1080p”, so I’m guessing that it’s supported. I doubt it’s the PS3 itself. Maybe it’s the HDMI cable? It was a cheap one for sure. I certainly don’t want to go out and get ripped off when buying another HDMI cable, but if I can find a reasonably priced alternative then I’ll probably give that a shot next.
With my 360, I left my display at 720p since 1080i looked bad. But with the PS3, I think 1080i looks slightly better. We’ll see what happens. If anyone has any info that might help me out here, please let me know!
