PlayStation 4: Geared toward Home Entertainment - Page 3

I never buy a console when it is first released. I generally wait a minimum of two years. By then the price on the console will have dropped and a catalog of games will be available. In the case of the PS3, I bought it in the fall of 2009 when the slim model was introduced. I was just going to buy a stand-alone Blu-ray player, but the PS3 at that point in time was only $100 more. I'm sure glad I went with the PS3 because little did I know it at the time, but they implemented 3D support on it and I ended up buying a 3D TV in December 2011. As a gaming console, I prefer the Xbox 360 because the controller is bigger and fits better in my hands, but the PS3 was everything I'd hoped for and more.

4K and a BD player on par with an OPPO player and I would be happy.

You have to remember that they are hoping for a 10 year shelf life. Even if it is only 8 years, like the current PS3, that still puts it hitting its peak as 4K starts to take off in 2016. It would be foolish not to have some sort of 4K solution. 4K movie playback is easy with the h.265 codec and decoder chips. Should have a BDXL drive for quad layer 128GB disc down the road, but most 4K movies can fit on the standard 50GB dual layer. 4K real time gaming will push it to its limit though, so you might see some 4K game "eye candy" running at low 30 fps, but most will probably be 1440p for the first few years, until 4K set start penetrating the market. I would also expect subsidize pricing. Probably $399 outright and $299 with 2 year PSN contract.

DIfference in GPU chip cost at this order level (tens of millions of units) is almost negligible, we're talking about $30 vs $40 or less so it won't change much, power envelope and performance are much more important factors. I think it will come earlier, by the Fall (back-to-school) season (though I could even imagine aiming for the Summer holiday season.)

Frostbite 2, meh.., Crysis 2, another lame, crappy game, easily surpassed it graphically. And Metro, Deus Ex etc, while being better games, have also looked just as good or better yet neither was a jaw-dropping experience for me... to me Shogun 2's rendering was pretty impressive, when you could fly over entire armies while fighting on the battlefield in real time...

Those visual acuity graphs are slopes, not hard thresholds: it's not like you can't benefit from any increase in resolution, it's just that to gain the maximum benefit you need to be close enough or have a big enough screen to resolve ALL the pixels. That does NOT mean there is no benefit whatsoever, so I declare bubkis on this point of view. It is erroneous.

Also, I bought a BenQ projector for 850$ bucks and will never go back to a regular HDTV. I hear more and more people buying them, since they are getting uber cheap. I don't think 4K will make as much an impact in TVs as quickly as they will in projectors, and when people realize you can get so much more oopmh for your buck (esp with short throw pico projectors using lasers that are coming out), I suspect the TV market will be quite a bit different in a few years. People's phones will likely have projectors on 'em.

I missed this - yes, this is true, you are correct, it's about curves, not cutoff limits. It's about arc min to dpi and it depends on various factors, the angle, the light level, distance etc. Also if you ask anyone to take a look at a 2560x1440 or 1600 render and a 1080p one of the same picture on two 27" or 30" monitor they can immediately tell them apart even from 3-4 feet so on a twiice bigger screen it's even more pronounced, even from further away.

I don't get it... you bought a 4K projector for $850 or what...?

Sign me up! I think RLBurnside is saying that more and more people are getting projectors and so as more people get into projectors, 4k will be much more desirable. A lot of people who have projectors are running them on screens at or greater than 120". If you could buy a tv that large, I shudder to think how much it would cost. Yet, you can get a great looking 1080p 3D projector for around 1k (BenQ W1070). It's ridiculous.

Have you ever seen a 4K TV (or projector, other than the theater)? I'm getting really tired of people saying that you can't tell the difference between 1080 and 4k unless you have a giant screen; you most certainly can. Granted, you may not NEED the extra resolution, but you most can definitely tell a difference and it DOES look better.

How long had HD been around before Blu-ray/HD-DVD?

The first HD tv were seen in what 2000? 480p/1080i anyone remember that 1/2 of a decade, DVI? Life before HDMI?

People started getting hd panels well before Blu-ray/HD-DVD were sorted. There were 6 years of HDTV sales before the format war.

Where are we at now? 4k is high end only. There is one PJ right now, 25kish MSRP. There were some fancy TVs at a trade show? MSRP? If you have to ask.. I don't think it will be six year but I really don't think 2013 is the year of mainstream 4k, it could be a real lazerdisk.

We have not even battled over what is the best up converting Blu-ray player yet because very very few have 4k displays.

The 4k space is way to young to have a game console this year bring it out to a Mass audience this year. It is not complicated math. If Sony attempts it they are desperate and sinking I don't think a $600 console and small amount of media will sell $10k+ TVs. $3k TVs Maybe buy not flagship products in this economy.

BTW if you have seen a current 4k screen you have seen flagship products with more than just resolution bumps. Sub par content is still going to be sub-par.

As an owner of an PS3 and an Xbox 360 what I would like from Sony.

1. Native Voice chat support. Be able to chat with friends outside of the game context. Something they could have done years ago...
2. Better support for network games. Xbox works WAAAAAAYYYY better from my experience.
3. Continue to have good hardware that lasts. My 20gb PS3 works just fine.
4. Continue to have an A grade steaming platform and blu-ray player.
5. Modern gaming horsepower. NATIVE 1080p@60fsp without sweating. Set a new standard for HD games at launch. Games that look like blu-rays.
6. Less firmware updates and better security of user data.
7. No to added $$$ of cost for 4k launch support. Something I don't want just yet. If they can do it cheap sure yea but I don't see how that is possible without standards in place.

What I think I will get from Sony:
1. There next Media appliance platform.
2. Maybe a new controller : al wii u and xbox kinect. Maybe tablet apps that can be data screens?
3. Maybe a step towards "family" games.
4. Decent bump in horsepower but no benchmark games for it.
5. Increased HD space (500gb or more) and online game distribution, maybe cloud storage for games.
6. End of life date for my PS3 and it online steaming services.

The GAMES will dictate if I jump in early or not this time around. It is going to be an interesting year for game consoles.

Have Fun!

Why are people saying 1080P vs. 4k? It's either 2k vs. 4k or 1080P vs. 2160P. Since 2K is 1920 x 1080 and 4k is 3840 x 2160.

you will need at least a quad blu-ray for both 10 bit uhd (using h.265) and an object-oriented soundtrack like dolby atmos or dts's multi-dimensional audio format. if they deliver anything less, uhd media will have a very hard sell in gaining interested buyers.
Edited by Dan Hitchman - 2/12/13 at 12:55pm

Since you've supplied zero specifics we should just take it as your opinion, right?
If so then you are wrong.

Any game developer worth his salt should be using gpu horsepower to push better graphics effects and textures and improving frame rates, rather than wasting the horsepower simply driving more pixels.

The console shouldn't be driving 4k res while gaming, but I certainly welcome 4k video playback and up converting.

I always thought they concentrated on making more smart and realistic gameplay. So that's the CPU right?

When I say that I mean like smarter enemies ect. I believe the Last Of Us will be pushing that a bit further.

T2k,

I'm going off of what I've gleaned from discussions about object-oriented soundtracks (quite a bit more sophistication than your normal channel-based audio codecs like DTS-MA or Dolby TrueHD) and the H.265 video codec. Given the ratio of compression to have equivalent 2160p @ 24 fps (at, say, 10 bit 4:2:2 -- not 8 bit!) compression quality to H.264, you need bitrates somewhere in the same ballpark of the high 30 Mbps or greater. Look at a Blu-ray on a projection system that only has video encoded in the teens and 20's. Macroblocking and banding artifacts are usually more apparent... and now we have multiple times the pixel depth to deal with.

European broadcasting of UHD is starting at bitrates in the 40's (and broadcasting quality has never been as good as physical HD media). Now, add on full 2160p 3D capabilities and high frame rate material (48 and 60 fps and others) and then combine a larger file size and bit pool for object-oriented sound (Dolby Atmos or DTS Multi-Dimensional Audio) and you need more space and a higher bitrate than a normal 50 GB Blu-ray disc to hold and stream the data. Also, the video compression must hold up to larger average screen sizes for UHD content.

It's possible that even 128 GB may not be enough... there are 250 GB Blu-ray discs available via TDK.

I would rather UHD finally have video that is visibly lossless to the 4k master with state of the art audio than suffer from extreme compression in order to fit the data down an antiquated internet pipeline.

Take the $1,500 RED Player, for example. It is solely internet based (no physical media) and the audio specs for their UHD downloadable movies are already lower than Blu-ray. We're going backwards, not forwards with internet content. iTunes, for example, may be more convenient for ala carte songs, but the quality just isn't there. I don't want the same thing to happen to home theater.
Edited by Dan Hitchman - 2/13/13 at 10:05am

First, game developers use middleware/engines/etc, they rarely go out their way and change the renderer etc.
Second, the two are not mutually exclusive and as a matter of fact higher resolution equals much better visuals byu default so it's rather the opposite than what you think.
Third higher resolution also means saving performance from performing multiple AA etc - an SD game requires pretty sophisticated AA but when I play in 2560x1440 I can pretty much disable AA altogether, thanks to the resolution.

Again, the two are pretty much go hand-in -hand - you don't watch BD when you are playing a game so the AMD chip can handle all of that... I think PS4 should push the gaming resolution much higher, absolutely, it's not even a question - 2560x1440 is completely doable, I expect it to be the new '4K' when it comes to games.

Not necessarily. Since the introduction of GPGPU/compute APIs there are a lot of things that now being calculated on graphics cards much faster than on general-purpose CPUs - it depends on the game type, the engine, the type and manner of the calculations you want to do etc.

I doubt it... to me having dynamic environments is much more important than how some lame zombie is able to hide behind something... check out the STALKER-series on PC, they did some pretty amazing job when it comes to dynamic environment.
Edited by T2k - 2/13/13 at 10:09am

It does not matter, they carry audio only and some metadata/algorithm/whatnot, they are not significant compared to video information.

Says who? See, that's why I asked for details - you can use h.265 at any bitrate and it will look significantly better than same-bitrate h.264 footage. This also means h.265 significantly improves efficiency, often in the range of 30-40% - according to tests ~8-10Mb/s h.265-encoded 1080p24 w/ 7.1c looks pretty good, BD-like[/b] - double that and you have 4K, add another 2-4Mb/s (for whatever overhead we want to deal with/all that extra fancy audio meta info/whatnot) and SUM= ~20-22Mb/s or about ~10GB/hr or so, easily fitting even 3+ hour movies w/ extras onto current BD50 disks.

I'm pretty sure you are mixing up MPEG2 and MPEG4 bitrates... I don't recall the exact numbers but my best looking BDs are either ~38Mb/s MPEG2 or ~18-20Mb/s MPEG4 encodings as far as I remember.
FYI macroblocking is a classic MPEG2 issue, it's a lot less prevalent in MPEG4 and in h.265 they are introducing much more intelligent encoding algorithms eg it only increases the sampling resolution where it counts (in a very simplistic way: a big, solid black aread won't get the same sampling rate as a more complex one next to it but the latter peaks up very high etc.)

Interesting - I couldn't recall a single "bitrate" metioned in ITU's Rec2020 doc so I pulled it up again - can you find one in this for me? http://www.itu.int/dms_pubrec/itu-r/rec/bt/R-REC-BT.2020-0-201208-I!!PDF-E.pdf

(FWIW it wouldn't even make sense to try to 'diktat' things like this as it's up to the individual equipment vendors, SoC suppliers etc and their customers to come up with sensible offerings.)

I'm pretty sure you are way off predicting larger than BD50 requirements and the internet is only "antiquated" because of our quasi-monopoly based, corporate-rigged, anti-competitive telecom market landscape, where FCC is in the pocket of these big, giant scumbag corporations like ATT, TWC, Comcast etc.

They had to offer something to complement their camera systems and at the same time they might try it on the HT market... different approach, even different market segment.

It's pretty much a given that Orbis will include 4K support at least in the XMB and video playback. If they can support 4K video playback, they will be able to support full 1080p, 60fps gameplay. Also Sony has already released 4K Blu-Ray players last year (BDP590 and 790) and Denon also released 4K receivers last year (AVR3313) to coincide with that (they also do 4K upconversion). If they are already making BDP's and receievers with 4K support it's pretty obvious Sony is going to release the Orbis with 4K support.

Actually EuropeanBroadcastingUnion recommends:

There will also be EBU recommendations for UHD.

That looks to me like a link to 3rd party site, with no official signs... anything on ebu.ch?

Also he was talking about UHD recommendations and specific numbers hence my link.

Even so it will be likely based on Rec2020.. I don't know, I doubt it will go as high as 40Mb - I couldn't find anything on EBU's site, all I found was this: http://tech.ebu.ch/testsequences

ALbeit it does not mean jack about their final recommendations out of curiosity I've requested and received access to the sets, they are downloading as I'm typing it; once it's here I'll load one of the UHD-1 sequences in Fusion and take look at their numbers...

I wrote that post because i was aware of EBU bitrate recommendations.

The logo in my link is the official EBU-UER logo, it seems to be a EBU Seminar (EBU TECHNICAL hoffmann@ebu.ch)

Here is another one (same logo);

You made great point there,but sony is coming 4k bluray movies or production and also the 4k tv's are going to be expensive,well im not buying one if its over 3 thousands dollars.

You made great point there,but sony is coming 4k bluray movies or production and also the 4k tv's are going to be expensive,well im not buying one if its over 3 thousands dollars.

You made great point there,but sony is coming 4k bluray movies or production and also the 4k tv's are going to be expensive,well im not buying one if its over 3 thousands dollars.

Only regular 4K transmissions are by Eutelsat at framerates of 50p encoded in MPEG-4 and transmitted at 40 Mbit/s in four Quad HD streams.
When they starts to use HEVC the transmission bitrate will be about half of that.

4K can be compressed with transparency to source much harder than HD because of the higher and cleaner (provided they use proper 4K++ cameras) camera image quality.

As to the PS4 UHD abilities.

Sony is launching a 4K player this summer that will either download or stream (with pre buffer time) 4K content. It would be very strange if that player capability is not included in the PS4.

Some talk about the player and and some images of the disc shaped player in this video; http://revision3.com/tzdaily/sony-4k-media-player
(Shouldn't be confused with the 4K download unit Sony is licensing to buyers of their 4K TV)

Without a unified product and unified standards as with Blu-ray, this UHD media war will spell disaster in the marketplace. It'll be HD-DVD vs. Blu-ray x1,000.

Consumers were baffled by just two HD disc choices and some industry analysts think the studios never recovered fully from that... now there will be way too many UHD download choices of varying qualities. Is each studio going to release their own player? Will some titles only be on certain services and not on others? Will the A/V quality be based on price?

Will they have 24 bit, lossless object-oriented soundtracks?

I see a nightmare on the way.

Yes, that's what I was saying above, that 40Mb/s must be h.264 and that h.265 will be around 20-25Mb, exactly.

I wonder if they will stick with Dualshock for their next controller or create something new.