Last Saturday I was doing a High Definition demo, out came the 3:10 to Yuma Blu Ray disc, its one of my favourites, crisp picture and True HD 7.1 sound, gun shots from all around, bass shaking explosions and tobacco chewing cowboys, what more do you need?

I don’t get round to watching many films on Blu ray though I still keep buying them, gathering dust on my shelf! So when I turned on the PS3 ready to insert the film I wasn’t particularly surprised to see the update request appear in the top right corner. In fact the week prior to that I’d been to London with a friend to a Smart Car rally and festival, that’s a whole other story, but he’d mentioned the update, so being that he knew all about the new features I take it this update has been round for a while and I’m just behind the times as I never get to sit down and watch films.

However I was quite excited (sad as I am) as it appeared to be a major update going from the realms of 2.x.x to Version 3!
5 minutes of downloading and updating, a quick chat about TV’s, amplifiers, speakers and the like, with a few slurps of coffee and a reboot of the PS3 and we were ready to roll once again.

Some new tiled effects springing to the side from the main menus advertising new games, features and downloads, all seemed cosmetic, nothing exciting jumped out and slapped me. So we continued flicking through the chapters of 3:10 to the vibrantly coloured scenes where the battles raged and the sounds filled the room. My customer was suitably impressed.

It wasn’t until a few days later I suddenly remembered the conversation from London and the mention of BBC’s iPlayer now featuring on the PS3, so I swiftly moved from my office to the living room and powered up the system, slid through the menu system and stopped at the new TV icon, then from underneath the iPlayer logo popped out. I quickly hit the button and was presented with a polished, near full screen iPlayer browser screen with a black background. Having missed Dragons Den on Sunday evening I thought it would be the perfect opportunity to see how good it was. The program was fed wirelessly to the PS3 from my Netgear N router, with minimal pixilation throughout an no audio glitches whatsoever  I was very impressed. I did stop half way to read through the guide to using the iPlayer on PS3 that gave some tips for making a few setting adjustments for optimal playback, disabling the screen saver helped, and pressing the X button twice to move between full screen and browser mode were the most helpful hints. All in all I was really impressed.

A few days later my wife tried watching a program but reported lots of buffering (stopping and starting), this was purely a bandwidth issue as she was downloading on her PC at the same time.

I’m sure that if I fed the signal through our powerline networking system there would be no glitches at all but I was still amazed at the quality in full screen mode on a 50” TV.
If you haven’t tried it yet go get that update, and if you haven’t got a PS3, now maybe the time to invest as it looks like it’s beginning to become an excellent media hub for the living room, with a new lower price (I won’t say low!) and new looking slim line model, grab one before Christmas or you may find the shelves empty!

Here’s the official PS3 blog with detailed info on the update:
http://blog.us.playstation.com/2009/08/playstation-3-firmware-v3-00-update/

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