100 million PlayStation 4 consoles sold

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/07/30/100-millions-playstation-4-con.html

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I remember way back when approximately 5-10 years ago, you’d see countless articles explaining that you can really only tell the difference between 720 and 1080 resolutions at very large screen sizes. Now that we’re moving past 4k to 8k. Other than capitalism/$$/etc., what’s the point?

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Very, very large screen sizes?

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I wish Samsung would make my living room bigger.

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A high res VR headset manages this trick.

I was very impressed by the WMR “Cliff House”.

Although it is just a Trick. It ultimately is not a more comfortable way of watching movies and TV.

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8k doesn’t necessarily make a difference based on the combination of screen sizes and viewing distances and content available to most people. If you’re a successful TV or movie industry person with a dedicated home screening room … well, you probably already have a big 8k TV. Otherwise, I don’t see much reason to rush.

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As somebody that grew up with 525 lines of Black and White displayed on 19 inches, it is all pretty amazing looking to me.

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No forthcoming consoles will be using a Nvidia GPU. AMD has that market sewn up.

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I wonder how much sales of PS2 and PS3 were skewed by people buying thousands at a time to build computing clusters with their cell processors.

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I finally got one this Christmas due to a good sale… it has taken up too much of my time lol.

So… The Bone, is it now just a doorstop?
I’d think it was slightly amusing if it was now just a doorstop.

I own both. My PS4 is mostly a door stop. In fact it’s the biggest buyer’s remorse purchase I’ve had in the last 5 years. I mostly play online, and man Playstation is garbage for online features, messages and socialization. The amount of spam messages I see in my inbox should be a huge point of Shame for Sony.

I see… I don’t find that amusing at all.
These old man hands can’t work a controller so I guess that makes me
a PC overlord.

Are there any good games yet?

Heh, so the only real reason I bought a PS4 was to play Street FIghter 5, since my PC at the time was just under the minimum specs. Turns out SF5 is one of the worst entries in the series. The last time I booted up the PS4 to play it was also the update where they finally allowed to users to change their names. Well, I changed it, and it locked me out of my SF5 profile even though the game wasn’t on the “name change issues” list. Now I can’t even boot the game up and play the game I paid for, and I bought a couple of season passes for characters too. No one at Sony would help me, I was reduced to shouting into the void at Capcom on Twitter to try and get support. None came.

The last generation, I had an Xbox 360. It died 8 or 9 times. Microsoft replaced it for free every time. I had a PS3 that the DVD drive died in. Sony did nothing. Sure it sucks the 360 was so unreliable, but at least Microsoft tried to make good. I keep buying Sony products and regretting it.

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Very large screens, very small ones, and detail.

Very large is obvious - you want to project a 100” picture on a wall in your theatre room, then 1) I’m jealous, and 2) 8K helps you there.
Very small - when the screen is inches from your eye, such as VR, pixel density, and even subpixel alignment and orientation, start to matter. Even on phones and laptops, where you are much closer to the screen, you need a pretty detailed image on a fairly dense display to not see jaggies.
Detail - screengrabs from 420p video look pretty terrible on today’s retina displays. even 1080p has to be upsized on most tablets and laptops. 8K images start to get close to the point where most displays, at most sizes, can give you images you can zoom in on or crop and maintain detail.

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Tomorrow’s landfill today.

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I switched to using a 42" 4K television as my desktop monitor, and was surprised to notice that I can see the pixels again. Turns out it’s only about 100 ppi! Medieval! With 42" displays on the desktop – a growing segment – 8K is going to be quite welcome.

For similarly sized TV sets at least a couple of yards away, though, it seems a bit of a wheeze.

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It certainly was easier for me to see the benefits of upgrading from PS2 to PS3 (Blu-Ray! WiFi! Wireless controllers! Built-in hard drive! Streaming video! Downloadable content! High definition!) than from PS3 to PS4 (slightly higher definition!) I guess diminishing returns are to be expected at this stage in the game.

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I was watching a video about cell phones and they talked about a similar phenomena. The quality and feature set of budget and mid range phones continues to improve. Meanwhile 2019 premium phones look a lot like the 2018 models. I’m actually still running an Iphone 8 plus since 2017 and haven’t seen anything that compels, me to spend a bunch of money on a new premium phone even though I have the money to spend if I wanted to.

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