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PS4 Pro is due out in November, and Pocket-Lint are reporting that Sony Interactive Entertainment’s executive vice president of hardware engineering department Masayasu Ito has stated to Pocket Lint that the main reason is that people stream more 4K video than buy the discs.
Really? That’s only because the discs are a new thing. Sony are wrong on this. Hard drives are cheap as chips, so there’s no excuse not to give us a 2Tb drive, and if the Xbox One S can manage a 4K Blu-ray player at £250, then how come the PS4 Pro can’t at £350.
…Or are they going to sell us the PS4 Pro 2 in 2017 with a 4K Blu-ray player included??
And note that the cheapest standalone 4K Blu-ray player is a Samsung unit at around £430, so straight off the bat, you’ll be quids in with the Xbox One S!
Personally, I never bought an Xbox One as I moved over from the 360 to the PS3 over the course of time, and I think the Sony console has better exclusives. In addition, I thought the huge shell that the XO comes in was quite hideous. Yes, there’s a smaller model, now, and it’s looking more sleek, but a lot of the features it came with were nothing in which I had any interest (I don’t need to record the last few seconds of a kill in a game – I’m already using an Elgato HD capture to record the whole thing, and I don’t need to shout at my console, either. I much prefer to use the controller). If I was in the market for a 4K player, and really needed one, I’d buy the Xbox One S purely on that basis. Yes, I could also play the odd Xbox game, but I bought a new, fast PC last year with a GTX980 graphics card and so can play most of the same games on there, anyway.
And while streaming 4K will play a part for a number of people, if Xbox are doing the 4K Blu-ray device and Sony aren’t, that will only look bad for the latter.
And all this is before Xbox Project Scorpio is revealed in full…
And there’s also the PS4 Slim coming next week, which is a slimmer version of a console which wasn’t a behemoth. Unlike the original Xbox One.
In any event, I would need to buy a 4K TV, and I don’t feel I need it just yet. My Panasonic 50″ plasma is four years old and shows no signs of dying off, yet, and since cinemas such as the Vue Lowry are regularly using 4K projection systems, and projecting onto a huge-ass screen, would I get that much benefit between 1080p and 4K even on a 50″ TV?
And, in any event, 8K TV is coming in 2020 for the Tokyo Olympic Games, so 4K will soon be yesterday’s news.
The PS4 Pro is released on November 10th, and the Xbox One S is out on September 22nd, but first there’s the PS4 Slim, available from this Friday, on September 16th. As for Project Scorpio, that’s any time in 2017.
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.