Quote Originally Posted by Mr Peabody
From what I understand the PS3 is the only one that does play SACD. I can't believe the PS3 and Sony's other BR machines come from the same company, or should I say have the same name, I doubt they actually come from the same company, maybe same umbrella.
Well you kinda have to give sony a break on this one. All the things that are required of the PS3 require large amounts of processing. The Cell is more powerful by a long way than any of the standalones on the market now. It has to be. In order to keep the price down(which you know was a PS3 problem to gamers) you cannot put a Cell processor in any standalone. So it is understandable that the PS3 would be better than standalones are.

I ran across and interesting thing about the PS3 when researching HDMI switchers, it seems that several have a problem passing the PS3 signal where they will other HD content. If anyone is interested Oppo has one that rocks at $99.95, does remoter or auto with a priority port for satelite/cable boxes that remain on all the time. The boxes go into "low priority" to relinquish signal when one of the higher ports senses a signal.
Good call on the Oppo. I bought two so I could split each of the two HDMI inputs at my receiver into 6 inputs at the oppos. Works like a charm, even with the PS3.

One other interesting thing I saw while researching, a few reviewers actually said they bought the PS3 just for Blu-ray playback. I can't remember which thread the big numbers war was raging but apparently the PS3 is known for BR playback and purchased specifically for it.
This is why I got mine. It was a no brainer even though I do not play games. Its a SACD player(of which it outperforms quite a few SACD players in sound, almost all of them on paper), it is the most upgradeable player on the market (it can decode all of the audio formats (when Dts MA Lossless upgrade comes), its video and audio performance can be improved by firmware upgrades(the upconversion of CD upgrade really came in handy, and the 24fps did as well), and it is a profile 2.0 player from day one(with upcoming BD live firmware upgrade), you can use it to stream audio from the internet(Pandora is a hit in my hometheater as a before movie music), store music on its hardrive, in the future you will be able to connect a HD tuner and use the enternal drive to store shows, and via its USB ports connect a external drive for extra storage. The benefits of this thing was worth the $499 I plunked down for it. Gamers would not use most of this stuff, so I can understand them not being able to justify the earlier price of $599. But to me, it is worth that price.