Xbox 360 Premium vs PS3

I’ve spent quite a bit of time trying to decide between these two consoles and I think I’ve finally come to a conclusion having done quite a bit of research and spent some time playing both.

Price

PS3 is £50 more expensive but has Blu-Ray built in and Live service is a further cost for the Xbox 360.

HD Playback

PS3 is better, ships with Blu-Ray which looks like the format war winner. Blu-Ray stand alone players are still stupidly expensive (£300+!) which makes the PS3 a bargain.
Xbox 360 requires additional drive for HD-DVD another £100! (Blu-Ray not available but probably MORE expensive).

HD TV

Both support 1080P but PS3 has slight edge with HDMI 1.3

Connectivity

Both offer optical outputs to 5.1 HTS systems and Wired/Wireless access to the internet so tied.

Reliability

Xbox 360 has been a disaster zone; estimates running at 1 in 3 suffer from Red-Ring-of-Death occurrence. Disks can be scratched by the console and you can’t get your money back or disks replaced. As well as Red-Ring-of-Death other hardware problems with the console reported. Playstation 3 has very few widely reported hardware problems beyond what would be expected (1% or less). Microsoft has extended the warranty for the RRoD issue ONLY but it is worrying. Overall PS3 wins by landslide on this issue.

The Games

No two ways about it, right now Xbox 360 has more, significantly better games available right now. Will 2008 be the break through year for the Playstation 3 when we finally start to see some “System Sellers”? I don’t know. Maybe, if MGS4 really is that good there are some better games coming out but still not enough.

Online

Right now Xbox 360 has the edge, the "Live" service is better although it costs.

Noise

It’s a small thing but the Xbox 360 IS annoyingly noisy, so much so that that I wouldn’t really want to use it as a playback device because whenever the movie was quiet I’d be aware of the whirring of the 360. As a result the 360 is very poor as a playback device. Another clear win for the PS3.

Graphics

Generally most games seem to look better on the 360.

Technology

Listening to a number of informed technical pundits and programmers the Xbox 360 seems to have the edge here too. Most technocrats seem to agree that the 360 has overall the better hardware setup, although it will always be debateable. Most programmers (that have expressed an opinion) seem to agree that the 360 is easier to program for and the technology is much easier to exploit and leverage. The 360 gives the developers what they want, in the format they want it while the PS3 is difficult to harness to it’s full potential. This should mean over the console’s lifetime that we get better games and better looking games from the 360.

Conclusion

So after all of that were am I? Well it might surprise you but I’m coming down on the side of the Xbox 360. I think to play games (it’s primary purpose) the 360 is the console to have right now and it has the best titles available.

It also comes down to this, basically I have quite a lot of faith in Microsoft, I think the Xbox 360 is really important to them as is the console market and they will adapt as necessary to serve their customers. They have pledged 1 billion dollars towards the cost of fixing Xbox 360’s and they claim (and it seems to hold up) that Xbox 360’s manufactured recently don’t suffer from the same problems thanks to moving to a 65nm process and they have changed the DVD player to a different manufacturer. I think Microsoft WILL see their customers through the Xbox 360’s problems come hell or high water because they want to keep their customers and this resolves my concerns about reliability.

I think even if Sony do finally raise their game in 2008 (and they have to) and get some really good games out there I think Microsoft will push even harder to compete and have just as many good games and so far the Xbox 360 defiantly has many more superior titles.

Finally while the PS3 is a much better deal on paper for HD playback I think the format war isn’t quite over yet and so waiting a little longer may not be a bad thing and if it turns out that Blu Ray really has won (and we’ve heard that a few times before) then Microsoft will very likely pop out a Blu Ray player for the 360 or more likely I’ll buy a separate player once the prices drop to ~£100.

So that’s all, it’s an Xbox 360 for me.