PLAYSTATION 3 TO GAIN DVD UPSCALING CAPABILITY?

Kotaku is reporting that in an interview with Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal, Sony’s Phil Harrison leaked the news many PlayStation 3 owners have been waiting to hear… Sony is working on bringing DVD upscaling to the PlayStation 3;

“I think in order to engender trust in our users, we have to share some things that might be not quite perfect, but are ready to give you an indication of what’s coming. So we could say, “You know, we’re not sure when it’s coming, but we’re going to have DVD upscaling on Playstation 3.” – Phil Harrison

For those of you who don’t know what the big deal is, DVD upscaling is a process in which standard DVD’s which are normally only capable of being displayed at 480p are digitally upgraded to support 720p resolution. In other words, it makes regular DVD’s play in high-definition. While you can buy regular DVD players that perform the same function, the fact that this is something that can apparently be added free of charge via a firmware update will definitely be a positive boost to the PS3’s image.

• PS3 Getting DVD Upscaling – Kotaku

SONY: PS3 WILL MAKE THE PC OBSOLETE

Before I could stop laughing at Ken Kutaragi’s comments in the previous article, I came across another great article over at Gamespot regarding an interview that Phil Harrison, Sony’s president of SCE’s Worldwide Studios had with German magazine Der Spiegel. Not to be outdone by Mr. Kutaragi, Harrison went as far as to state that the Playstation 3 will perform so well, it will make the PC, and by extension Microsoft’s operating systems obsolete;

“We believe that the PS3 will be the place where our users play games, watch films, browse the Web, and use other [home] computer functions, The PlayStation 3 is a computer. We do not need the PC.”– Phil Harrison as quoted in the article at Gamespot.

I don’t know folks, is it really right to use a supercomputer for such mundane things as watching films and surfing the ‘net? Shouldn’t it be trying to map the human genome or something? I guess it’s a moral dilemma for each purchaser to face on their own.

All this PS3 information just makes me wonder… will it make me breakfast in the morning too? Head on over to Gamespot here for all the details and to see Harrison essentially say “nuh uh” in reference to implications that Sony simply decided to just copy Nintendo’s motion control idea at the last minute so they’d have something new to show at E3.