Much Ado About Everything

I have never seen as much functionality added with a “minor” update.  Not to a mainstream consumer product at any rate.  Or perhaps my memory is short, and this used to be the norm – I would not be surprised.

The three most useful new features:

• DVD upscaling
• PS1/PS2 game upscaling
• Media Streaming (DLNA support)

DVD upscaling is simply amazing.  This is the best implementation that I’ve ever seen.  People still claim Toshiba is doing it slightly better – but I don’t have that.  What I do have is HQV benchmark and that one when run on PS3 gives me the best score I’ve ever seen.  Only one frame sequence failed to deinterlace properly!  And apart from not doing all the noise filtering that it could do, I have no complaints whatsoever.  It only does 1% overscan on top and 0% on all other sides!  The picture looks great.  I turned off my DVD player and am using my PS3 for DVD playback all the time.

Game upscaling is also great, though I have not been able to establish quantitatively how good it is, other than it is considerably better.

Media streaming… it took a while to even get it to work.  Photos and music were not too tough but video took me more than a week.  It took much longer to get it to play back my lossless audio, but it can do even that now.  The only remaining problem is video – the quality isn’t all that good but more importantly, other than 1.5x fast forward, you can’t do anything else without it restarting.  So it’s not really useful for video at all.  Hopefully this will be improved in the near future.