Our Sony Playstation 3 is dead, and we won’t miss it

We purchased the Playstation 3 in May 2008, for the primary purpose of watching Blu-Ray movies. At $399, a 40GB PS3 was the same price as a dedicated Blu-Ray player. (You can read the story here.)

For the first year, we enjoyed the hi-def movie experience. Since the summer, however, the movie images had been deteriorating, with blinking white speckles showing up on all output from the device. The speckles showed up whether we were using HDMI or not, and no matter which resolution we tried. After some experimentation, we determined that it wasn’t a cabling or television issue, but was a hardware issue with the PS3.

Last night, we sat down to watch a movie (“The Final Countdown“). When we turned on the PS3, the TV display was corrupted and showed an error message. Then it died — no picture or sound. We tried all the tricks for resetting the video (power cycling with the rear switch, holding down the 1/0 button until there are two or three beeps) for over an hour. It’s dead, stick a fork in it.

Our son is going to see if he can resurrect the unit, but otherwise, we’ve decided that it’s toast. Once he gives up, that’ll be that.

Fortunately, we only own four Blu-Ray movies, and one PS3 game. (The bulk of our Blu-Ray movies came from Netflix.) We’re going to sell the game and PS3 accessories to GameStop — maybe they’ll buy the broken unit too.I’d told Netflix to go back to sending us DVDs again, and we’ll just sit on the movies we own for now.

Are we going to replace the PS3 with a new Blu-Ray player? No. We have a nice up-converting Samsung DVD player that works great with our 1080p flat-screen TV… it’s what we used before purchasing the PS3.

Even though prices have come down, the family consensus is that the Blu-Ray movies weren’t sufficiently better than standard DVDs to warrant purchasing another Blu-Ray player.