Those critical of the PlayStation 3’s price often point to
the Blu-ray Drive components as culprits for the system’s spendiness. Not only
has the inclusion of Blu-ray into PlayStation 3’s spec driven up the bill of
materials cost, it’s also much to blame for the initial shortage of consoles at
launch and the delayed
release into Europe and Australia.
Sony said recently that it plans to have shortage problems
solved by May. “The blue laser diode, as you well know, had a blip
short-term ramp up issue, which is now past; that's now behind us,” said Phil
Harrison, SCE Worldwide Studios, in a GameDaily
interview. “That did cause us some challenges in being able to supply the
launch worldwide, but that's all resolved.”
Some consumers clamor on Internet forums that the Blu-ray
Drive’s added cost is nothing but another effort for Sony to sneak its HD
format into the homes of consumers, and that Sony should remove Blu-ray functionality
from the console and offer it as an add-on. Of course, such arguments seem to
ignore that PS3 games also run off of blue laser media, and that the Blu-ray format
can do more than just movies.
“We needed to have Blu-ray disc from a game design point of
view. The chipsets in PS3 chew through data at such a rate that in order to
build variety and detail and quality into the games, we need more than nine
gigabytes,” Harrison added. “Now, the fact that we could also adopt the
preeminent next generation movie format into PS3 was an added bonus, not an
added cost.”
Every new PlayStation generation features the latest in
optical disc technology. The original PlayStation used optical media when
Nintendo was still firmly planted into cartridges. The PlayStation 2 brought
affordable DVD players into millions of homes. And the PlayStation 3 makes the
generational jump to Blu-ray Disc.
Admittedly, the inclusion of the newest optical format has
plagued the latest PlayStation more than formats of past, but Sony remains
confident in the decision. “No regrets whatsoever, and it's those kinds of
decisions, painful though they were to live through in the last quarter of
2006, those are the decisions that are going to propel PlayStation 3 to be a
platform that lasts for ten years, like we've seen with PS1 and PS2,” Harrison
said. “And it will be, I believe, reflected on as the smartest decision we ever
made.”