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?
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.