10 Reasons the PlayStation 3 Should Be Your Blu-ray Player

jbrown, much of what you say is true only if you listen to the commenters in this thread, many of whom have their own agendas.

Specifically, your points 4, 5, 6 & 8 are all erroneous based on my personal experience:

4) I can hear the hard drive in my DVR more clearly than I can hear the fan in my PS3. In other words, it is essentially silent.

5) I’ve never, ever had to reboot my PS3 for this reason. I’ve been using it since Jan ‘07, pretty much daily. Sometimes I leave it running for weeks at a time.

6) I can’t directly comment on this, but would like to see a source better than a random commenter before I believe it.

8) Pure FUD. Has anyone here ever seen or heard of an instance of this happening? This belongs with the stories of the little old lady drying her poodle in the microwave

I am *not* arguing that a PS3 is a better choice than a stand alone for custom installers (the odd shape and the margin issues both argue against that). I just hate to see people start accepting comments as gospel.

I do think it is an excellent choice for consumers since you get so much for so little money, but as you point out, this isn’t a consumer site.

Erm, ok #6 isn’t based on my personal experience. But I would like to see stronger data before I believe it.

Apologies for the error on my part.

Mr. Smith:
#4 - This was directed at other Blu-Ray players being quieter, because they are. Period. This article is about Blu-Ray players, not noisy DirecTV DVRs. My DVR is louder than my PS3 too, until the PS3 starts to get hot and kicks the fan into high gear after being left on for 5 or 6 hours. My PS3 is in a 6” x 20” x 22” open-front compartment all by itself, so when it gets hot, it is due to only it’s own heat. By the way, the DVR noise is resonant, not emitted, some sorbothane feet and a little bit of Dynamat should help you out a lot.

#5 - I have had to reboot my PS3 only twice, in the past 5 months. Neither time was for any known reason. It still sucked both times, and if it had been mounted in a Middle Atlantic rack (like it would in a client’s home), with no access to the rear switch, I would have been quite peeved.

#6 - I am an ISF-certified technician, and have been actively calibrating displays for 8 years now. I’d like to think I can tell when one source outperforms another, but if you need verification, you can call Joel Silver and ask him how well my eyes work. My BDP-S2000ES looks better than my PS3 on both my current KDS-50A3000 and my previous KDSR-60XBR2. It also outperformed the PS3 recently on a Digital Projection Titan 1080p-250 we installed with a Lumagen Radiance XD. But that was just simple A/B tests, I will be bringing the DVE disc home this weekend and hopefully will have time to try that as well, but it is Mother’s Day, so no promises.

#8 - This is simple. You have contact on a disc that you wouldn’t otherwise have as a result of the loading mechanism. Classe uses the same crappy design on their CD and DVD players and to be frank, it sucks. The PS3 works better than the Classe, but it’s still contact and there’s still friction on the first 1/2” of the disc as you slide it in between the rollers before they begin to draw it into the machine. Any dust or dirt on the disc or rollers will cause a scratch, even if it is microscopic. I’m sure that there are only a few out of every million that experience problems, but for the OCD folks out there who treasure their discs, it’s an annoyance.

For the average guy who already has 5 remote controls and a bargain $999.00 flat-panel TV, the PS3 is a great choice, especially since he can’t play GTA IV in a BDP-S2000ES. But for the guy who has $100k or more to spend, the PS3 should be relegated to gaming and a true high-end player should be the primary Blu-Ray source.

*sigh* Why so defensive? (if you need verification, call…) I was just relating my experiences, because your post *seemed* to be just aggregating what other commenters had posted (to sum up). I see now that your list is from your own experiences.

I am an ISF-certified technician, and have been actively calibrating displays for 8 years now. Until you share your credentials (which you’ve now done, in more ways than one), no one can discern jbrown the ISF-certified technician from “jim” who posted above you. If you’d put that line in your original comment I wouldn’t have questioned the point, but I might have asked for more about your experiences with this topic.

Let me quote myself:

I am *not* arguing that a PS3 is a better choice than a stand alone for custom installers

We’re not on opposite sides here.

My post was just to illustrate that the points I was refuting are not major issues to most end users. Although you are a professional installer, many people who read this site (I work here) fall closer to the ‘prosumer’ end of the spectrum (read enough comments and that should become clear to you as well), and for people on a smaller budget, the PS3 is an excellent, reliable piece of equipment that offers a lot of functionality for its price.

I do appreciate you offering more data on the picture comparison, though. As I said, I have no personal experience there. I’ll have to think about replacing the PS3 with a stand-alone for movie watching, once my budget supports doing so.

This is one of the most ridiculous articles I’ve seen in this magazine.  The reasons to not use a PS3 as the sole BD player in a clients home far out way any reasons why you should.  We (CI’s) know this and this article does nothing to sway our opinion. 

I’d sooner buy into an article titled “10 Reasons Why Vizio Should Be Your Panel of Choice for Your Custom Installs”.

Clearly some Sony ad dollars were behind the article…did I miss the “advertisement” warning at the top of the page?