Yeah, I think that's what he means.. that the wi-fi works when he's in close proximity to the router, but not if he's further away, even though he's showing 100% signal strength. Weird.
Me, I just use a hardwired connection.. no fuss, no muss. Didn't have to set up a damn thing, just plugged it in and off it went.
Yep, you heard that right... I got one today. Last 20GB in town (believe me, I looked and called
everywhere).
First impressions:
Overall, I'm impressed. It's big, it's heavy, but seems very well-made, very sturdy. And shiny.
The quietness of the system actually led to me to believe it was broken at first. When I first powered it on (love the touch-buttons), it whirred up and then went dead silent. I thought it was having some sort of bootup problem. Turns out it was just
that damn quiet. When I put the first disc in, I thought to myself "damn that slot-loader's noisy", when it's probably a good deal quieter than the disc tray of the Xbox360 that's sitting next to it. Probably no louder than the tray on my DVD player. It just seemed loud after hearing only the barest whisper coming from the console itself. Got everything all set up, got it online, made me an online account (my standard username, if you're interested <------). My new USB key works just fine (*whew*.. after all the problems I had on the PS2 trying to find a working USB drive, and the fact that not all drives were compatible, had me worrying). I was able to load some test/calibration images that I have, in order to get the color/tint/brightness/contrast tuned in. Damn good thing, too, because the default brightness of the console was WAAAYYY too bright. All my other inputs I had to turn the brightness up one or two notches to be correct.. on the PS3, I had to turn it
down by about ten notches.
And, I watched my very first Blu-ray movie today. It's a "mid-grade" Blu-ray of the best damn Western ever,
Unforgiven. At first, I was watching it, thinking, "eh, it looks okay.. nice detail and all, but is it really that much better?" I was thrown off a bit by the framing of the 2.35:1 letterboxing, which was larger than I'm used to seeing on my DVD, so I popped in the
Unforgiven DVD that I own to compare. I think the "smaller" bars on the DVD are a result of the overscan coming from the 480p input. The framing of the shots within the image was also slightly different, but I'll account that to the fact that it's a new HD master. But man... as soon as I started watching the DVD, even after only a few minutes of watching the Blu-ray, I was all "OMFG MY EYES!!!" The DVD looked absolutely
horrid by direct comparison. Probably wouldn't have been so bad if I'd put off the TV for a few hours, but man... hot-switching back and forth between the DVD and Blu-ray was beyond night-and-day.. it was like a whole new world, even though it's the same damn movie. I can't wait to watch the other two BDs I own tomorrow, which are apparently far better in terms of PQ than
Unforgiven.
So far I've only come across one issue.. I won't call it a "problem", because it's easily correctable, and I think it's my TV and not the PS3.
Whenever it changes the output, for whatever, reason, my TV goes all wonky on the display. It's not HDCP, it's not the "flickering on/off" that some Westy owners have reported. It's like the TV doesn't know how to work the incoming signal, so it's all scrambled. I can fix it easily enough by switching to a different input, then back to DVI (I have HDMI>DVI because of some reports I've heard about the Westy's 1080p input over HDMI, but I also have a straight HDMI cable in reserve).
The reason I think it's the TV and not the PS3 is because it occasionally does the same thing with the PS2. Sometimes, when I pop in GT4 (it's only ever happened on GT4, oddly enough), the signal will be all scrambled like that, even with standard 480i input (and over component). To fix that, I just navigate to the Options menu and set the screen to 1080i (which, oddly enough, I can do from memory and what little I can make out of what's on-screen.. hehe). When the resolution changes to "test" 1080i, the display snaps back to normal, and then it's fine afterwards. Luckily, everything I've displayed straight through the XMB is fine (images, video, etc), no hitches whatsoever.
I didn't experience the "pausing" glitch that some people have reported on Blu-ray movies. But, as I had read on AVS, I disabled the network prior to watching the film. Gave me no trouble whatsoever. Except I forgot to turn it back on again afterwards, so it had a little trouble connecting to the Store for a moment.. hehe.
The Blu-ray remote works like a charm. I didn't have the controller on for most of the time I was using the system today. I turned it off before I watched the movie, and had no difficulties navigating around the XMB and the Store using the BD remote. And, of course, the movie controls are spot-on.
One other thing I noticed, and I haven't had time to fiddle with it yet, is that it doesn't seem to display PS2 games in widescreen. Even when they're set to widescreen. Granted, the only thing I tried was about ten seconds in
Shadow of the Colossus, but the PS3 didn't seem to care when I set the output to Widescreen. And, because it's DVI, I can't use the TV's "stretch" feature to fill the screen. Is that something I'm screwed on, or is there some setting I need to fiddle with?
All in all, though... I like it.
I'm downloading GTHD as we speak... let that run overnight and play it sometime tomorrow. So look for my scores if you like. Probably somewhere near the bottom... I ain't half as fast as some of the folks around here, and it'll take some getting used to the idea that everyone can see just how frikkin' slow I am now.. lol.
