PS3 Slim - Not Like the Original
posted Saturday Aug 29, 2009 by Scott Ertz
Our good friends over at Engadget just can't leave anything alone. They love numbers more than we do, so they test things. Lot of things. This week ,they tested the difference between the Blu-ray drive on the original PS3 and the PS3Slim. Guess what they found - the Slim's Blu-ray drive is slower than the original. Yucks.
We're actually a bit surprised by the results here, so we checked over these a few times. It seems that the PS3 Slim's Blu-ray player is actually a tiny bit slower than our 60GB PS3 classic from 2006, albeit not by much. The time between inserting the disc (listening for that last little 'click' sound) and having it register in the menu was pretty much the same ten seconds each time, but once you click on the disc and actually launch into the movie, the time it takes to get to a non-loading screen was seconds quicker on the classic. Not a drastic difference, but after so many years to improve theBD technology, you think they'd bother to add something with a little more pep here, and certainly not deliver something with less.
As excited as I am about the Slim, I still expected this. We knew that Sony had been looking for ways to lower the manufacturing cost on the new model so they could sell it for less, and that seems the easiest place to cut a cost. It is a disappointing scenario, but not totally unexpected.
What do you guys think? Does it matter that the new drive is a little slower, or does it just matter that it is half the cost of the original console?
