The percentage of sales people that recommend Samsung HDTVs.
Salespeople are also becoming less likely to recommend LCD sets over plasma sets, which goes against the industry trend.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
I think it's just retarded that developers have to do crap like this to support 1080i. Why didn't Sony just put in a proper scalier and not be so cheap in the first place. It just confuses the customer.
I don't think you can really blame Sony exclusively for their lack of a "proper scaler."
On the contrary, I blame the whole industry for failing to come up with a unified, logical plan for scaling video signals.
Specifically, they *should* have just mandated that all TV's would have decent built-in video scalers to convert any input signal to the TV's native resolution. That way, nobody would have to end up paying for redundant video scalers in every device they buy.
There is no need for upscaling DVD players etc. etc. if TV's have good scaling chips. Why pay for scaling chips in every box you plug into the TV when, if the industry was smarter/kinder, you *should* be able to only pay for a good scaling chip in the TV itself?
But instead, we all end up paying for most-likely lousy upscaling processors inside our TV's, then pay for a good upscaling DVD player, a scaling chip inside a BR player, a scaling chip in the 360, and expect Sony to put one in the PS3 so we can pay for that too (even though many people already say the PS3 is too expensive...).
So, while I don't blame sony for not putting a scaler in the PS3, I might blame them if it turns out Sony manufactured the culprit non-720p-compatible HDTV's.
Sony made some of the first CRT HDTVs (which cannot accept 720p natively) with decent 720p->1080i conversion. Many CRT HDTVs that do this convert 1080i to 480p, which looks pretty awful.
However, in the battle to make truly cheap RP CRT HDTVs (which constituted the low end of the market for a while), Sony did make some that don't accept 720p at all I believe.
DustoMan, let's assume for the sake of argument a scaler chip adds $2 to the cost of a PS3. It doesn't sound like much but that's $25 million down the drain, all to support obsolete 480p/1080i CRT sets when all modern sets support 480p/720p/1080i. It's not even an issue that places like Europe even have since the HD Ready logo means 720/1080i support is guaranteed.
It really sucks if you happen to own one of the old sets, but its not hard to see why Sony did it. Anyone with a modern set shouldn't have much to worry about, assuming their TV's 720p1080i scaling is up to snuff.
I have one of those "old" sets. It's a 55" Philips rear-projection CRT and it ONLY accepts 1080i, 480p and 480i signals. Having a PS3 downsample the image to 480p makes it appear no better than a Wii.
Every modern graphics card (as in the last 8 years!) in a PC or Mac can take a 320x240 video clip and make it full screen. It looks like s--t, but it works. No special scaler chip required.
My HDTV tuner box can accept 720p signals from local broadcasters which it upscales to 1080i. I would venture a guess they also use a similar scaling technique.
If the Xbox360 can do it, the PS3 can too, even if it does have to be done in software. The PS3 supposedly has the better CPU. Get one of the Cell cores to do upscaling!
Yeah, I have one of those 'obsolete' CRT sets too. My 65" Mits still looks great playing HD DTV, BluRay, 360 and PS3, even though it can only display 480i/p and 1080i.
I play most of my games on the 360 so I guess I haven't run into a PS3 game that doesn't scale to 1080i for me yet. But I can tell you if I had a game that refused to play 1080i and would only work at 480p on my TV I'd be more than pissed at Sony for saving that $2 on the scaler for my machine.