PS4 Slim Review

[Normchacho]

Guitarguy said:
Sony probably learnt from the launch PS3 experience. That console was overloaded with premium features. Blu Ray support in its infancy and when it wasn't even certain to become the leading technology against HD-DVD. 4 USB ports. Native PS2 hardware components inside the console allowing for almost perfect backwards compatibility that was enhanced via HDMI output. Various card inputs that only a photographer would really use etc. In the end, these features did not matter to the masses and only served to inflate the cost of the console severely.

I think dropping the optical port was silly in that is would have added all but $1.50 per console but by not including a 4K blu ray drive, it allows Sony to under-cut the Xbox One Slim quite significantly. Microsoft is now in the same position there were when they launched with mandatory Kinect bundles only. In fact, they are worse off because they cannot un-bundle a 4K blu ray drive outside of a hardware revision.

I for one would have loved the PS4 Slim to be able to play 4K blu rays, but then again I went out of my way to purchase a launch PS3 just to play PS2 games via HDMI and I happen to collect blu rays. I'm not even sure we will see 4K blu rays take off considering only very recent movies take full advantage of the format, as most movies in the last decade were at best filmed and finished in 1080P, rather than 2160P(4K). We did see 'mastered in 4k' blu rays but they were essentially 4K scans of the original prints downscaled to 1080P. Even The Martian was finished on a 1080P digital intermediate, although shot at 5K resolution... The 4k blu ray is upscaled from its 1080P master. Although now we are seeing more new films actually finished in 2160P.

I imagine that it was simply a case of very few people using the optical port. Think of it this way.

Say Sony sold 40 million PS4s with optical ports but only 2 million people ever used it. That means Sony spent $60 million on 2 million users.

So with the Slim they decided that it wasn't worth the cost or board space to include it.