Interview with SCE Engineers

 

In case you weren't convinced that the PS3 was the Blu-ray disc player to get, AV Watch has a new interview with SCE engineers where they discuss the current system software release as well as features that will be upcoming in the major summer update due to hit around June of this year.

As for the current release, 2.20, support was added for LTH (low-to-high) BD-R discs, which should enable cheaper recordable discs to be released soon.  The update also added BD-Live (profile 2.0) functionality to the PS3's already excellent list of Blu-ray features.

For DVD upscaling, mosquito noise reduction was added to allow better scaling of noisy sources, and the other existing filters were improved to allow for better scaling of DVD discs.

The most exciting news, though, was of what is now expected to come.  The engineers confirmed that both DTS-HD MA decoding and 1080i deinterlacing would be coming in a future update.

As for gaming functions, 2.20 freed up additional RAM to be available to game developers... something badly needed in the PS3's RAM-starved gaming environment.  Even with the reduction in RAM usage, there is still substantive talk at Sony about providing the oft-requested in-game XMB access, though the engineers gave no timeframe as to when such a feature would be able to be implemented.

Certainly, there is a case to be made for the additional video quality provided by certain standalone players (especially high-end models such as the Denon DVD-3800BDCI), but for anyone looking for a BD player with with support for all the features available on the format, the PS3 just looks better and better.  Congrats to the SCE team responsible for the Blu-ray implementation... as it truly is WAY above and beyond what one would expect from a "gaming console."