Actually finding Sony's booth within the monstrosity that is CES 2008 is a task in and of itself, but after some desperate twists, turns and semi-politely asking a few friendly fellow attendees, 1UP tracked down Sony's expansive presence at the technological expo. There wasn't much of a gaming display at their booth, but PSP senior product manager John Koller was on-hand to answer some of our questions about the future of their handheld, and we think you'll be surprised at some his answers.
Sounds like an example of "managed copy" which has only recently been finalised. I confess I thought this was a HD DVD offering but it looks like both camps are taking it on board.
Today at the 2008 CES, SCEA reps confirmed that GPS & Camera will be available on this continent by the end of the year.
SCEA reps also revealed Sony is working on a first-party keyboard for the handheld gaming system for release in mid-2009.
@lstormy10, I would counter that the PSP has seen a nice sales boost this Fall, and much of it is from the PSP Slim model which came with added features. Every additional feature to a console/portable makes it more appealing, and often it can result in someone buying the product before they may have planned to in the future. Also some people will buy something, i.e. PSP, a second time when the new model releases.
The new easy way to copy a BD disc (and probably DVD) will make many people very happy, instead of sitting and trying to encode a DVD and all of the hassle that involves on getting it onto a PSP. BD movie sales should benefit as you said. I also believe a slight increase in PSP and/or PS3 sales will happen when this feature and other new ones convince someone that owning both is better than only owning one.
I think the PS3 would likely give options of what resolution/quality to copy at, or it would be standardized to one setting for easy copying onto memory sticks & thus PSP.
Your comment means that either there will be a movie scaler S/W / utilities on PS3, or it will depend on the movie itself to provide 2 version, one for HD, one for PSP (lower res version).
From your post, I hink you believe that this feature will not significantly add to PSP sales potential. Am I correct ?
@lstormy10, I also like to add that if anything, this feature will just be seen as a positive if you were already considering a PSP or PS3 and already own the other or are considering both platforms. The most likely thing that this capability will do is to boost sales of Blu-Ray discs to current owners of the PS3 that also have a PSP if the service ends up being totally free.
Fix: In the first sentence of my previous post I meant to say "original resolution", not "original resoluation" - bad typo.
@apujanata, Well you would not be copying the content in its original resoluation (because that would not make sense because of the lesser resolution of the PSP screen compared to that of HD content on the Blu-Ray disc), so the amount of space needed would probably be less than you would think. I believe this capability is one of those things where it is nice to have and all, but not something that I see people buying the PSP or PS3 to be able to do - it is like how Sony has already added a boatload of features to both platforms already (specially the PSP), but neither platform is seeing overall sales boosts from the added features.
This capability is nice, but is it practical ? Blu Ray is very big (40 GB or more ?), while Memory Stick is very small (usually 2 GB - 4 GB). Even though Sony has announced a 15 GB one, but are you really willing to spend US$ 300 to enable blu-ray on the move ?
Sony today demonstrated the next level of disc copying. At the company's booth at CES, Sony demonstrated how you could put a Blu-ray Disc movie into a Playstation 3 and copy the film to a Playstation Portable or a Memory Stick. "This way, you can have a portable copy you can take with you," explains David Bishop, president of Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.
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