I mean, the answer is "because they were compressed to fit on a HD DVD", but you can still see this in the PC versions of games that came out in the seventh generation.
There's colour banding, crushed blacks and who knows what else going on with these things. PS2 cutscenes did not look as bad and they were in DVD quality.
I have to assume it wasn't this bad on the PS3. I mean, that's what the Blu Rays were for, right?
Sony tried to market the PS3 as a multimedia entertainment hub - in hindsight it was an idea ahead of its time, since that's what basically all Smart TVs are now - but the $700 price tag made it unattainable during the critical first year of sales.
it also launched with "install other OS" as a feature, which they removed later via an update.
It was expensive, but I think people forget what a stupidly good blu-ray player the PS3 was.
I, like many people, bought it because it was the best way to watch movies - with the added bonus of games. It was at least £100 cheaper than any decent blu-ray player. It worked better and more reliably than any of the other ones on the market. It was the only one that could access things like online blu-ray features for years and it got basically every future blu-ray player feature not only as a patch instead of having to buy a new unit, but sometimes months or years ahead of other blu-ray player manufacturers.
That's a good point, unfortunately while I was able to convince my mom to buy a PS2 when we needed a DVD player, I was not able to convince her to buy a PS3 and we ended up getting a normal blu ray player like two years later.
I'm old, so I already had an ok paying job and was living with flatmates when it came out and it was basically a way to save money on our home cinema setup.
I realise it would be pretty unattainable as a christmas present for a kid or whatever. I definitely wasn't cheap, just good value.
The PS3 was actually uniquely suited to stuff like cryptography because of the processor (which also makes it hard to emulate games built for it exclusively I guess). The US army had a whole bunch of them networked as a cluster computer.
Yeah I've heard about that, for certain applications they were a super cheap super computer. That's why I wish the official other OS support had been maintained - after it got dropped, support for it stopped getting worked on by the Linux community, imagine the wacky things they would have been able to do with it if support had never been dropped.
The hacking community has kept it alive to some extent, but I have never tried PS3 Linux. I have worked with the IBM Cell CPU used in PS3 before while making a traffic light control system. I chose it at that time because the need for a large amount of parallel vector math. It is shockingly good at this for the time it was made, but only if the application does not benefit from cache as the 7 SPUs do not have more than simple L1 cache. The tasks must also be completely parallel and code must be written specifically to run on the SPU.
When I made my comment I wasn't aware that there actually is a surviving PS3 Linux community! I wonder if my mom still has the fat PS3 I left at her house for the kids to use years ago...