NEW CONSOLES

PS3 SLIM CAUGHT MY EYE

While i'm not a PS3 fan, one spec of the new PS3 really caught my eye and that is, it can bitstream the new lossless bluray audio formats, DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD.  The 'fat' PS3 models can't do that, they can only decode those formats off of the disc and down sample them to LPCM and send that to your receiver, it's not the same.

So you can with the PS3 Slim send full 8 channel lossess uncompressed audio to your receiver and assuming you have an HD receiver, get the best quality audio sound possible.

I'm looking at the PS3's $299 price tag and i'm looking at the price tag of $150 for an audio card for my home theater PC that will give me the same lossless audio support and thinking maybe i should bag my htpc and get a PS3 SLim.  It can also play digital video files so i can stream my downloaded TV shows and movies from my Microsoft Home server. 

So really the only thing the PS3 can't do for me is act like a DVR.  Although PlayTV is available in the UK which turns the PS3 into a DVR.   Although it was announced in 2008 and still isn't available in the US so one has to assume it's not going to release here for NTSC.  Too bad, that's the one piece that still justifies spending $150 on the audio card i need for my HTPC to support TrueHD and DTS-HDMA rather than buy a PS3 Slim.

In XBOX 360 land the rumors are true

According to Engadget, the Walmart ad for this sunday shows the new white box Elite along side the rumored $100 price drop to $299 to compete with the PS3 slim price.   While microsoft doesn't have a 'slim' model, this leaves them with only the Arcade and the Elite SKU, the Pro will be discontinued.  That adds more fuel to the rumor fire about a third 'Natal' SKU coming sometime next year.  There have also been rumors for a long time that there will be a 'slim' xbox360 sporting a new combined CPU/GPU processor.  Natal will need more processing power so that would seem to support the new slim and processor rumors.

The $100 price drop really isn't a $100 price drop though.  Microsoft has taken the HD cable kit out of the package.  It doesn't come with the HDMI cable and toslink audio cable anymore, it also doesn't come with the combined component/composite cable kit either, it just comes with a standard def cable kit which i hope no one uses anymore, you're really missing out if you are.  If you have an HDMI receiver, you can just pickup an HDMI cable for 6 bucks from monoprice.com and that'll do your audio and video.  However if you need the toslink dongle, you'll need to shell out the 50 bucks for the microsoft HD cable kit which comes with the toslink dongle and a 6 foot hdmi cable.  Talk about a rip-off.  Even though the PS3 doesn't come with an HDMI cable either, it at least has a toslink port built in.