UMD a waste of time and money, says Perry

[hacksparrow]

Why does everyone always piss and moan about UMD? IT'S A PORTABLE CONSOLE, EVERY PORTABLE CONSOLE HAS HAD A PROPRIETARY FORMAT! Get over it, for the love of God. No one ever says the NDS cart's are a waste of time, or the GBA carts, or, I dunno, every nintendo proprietary fromat from N64 back. People just love to jump on Sony about going out and trying new things.

no but the umd is retarded in essense of loadin. pick any handheld console, there has bin zero discs that load, and are significantly faster than umd.

[steve520]

bah umd's okay but if they removed it imagine how lite the psp slim would be.

[IDidMyTime]

I agreed months ago that UMDS are a mistake in my view, and also a horrid way to try and push a new format on the market, Its a waste of time, money and effort, and the verdict cleary is written on the wall that nobody cares about the format.

Think about it this way, how much better would it of been if they used mini dvd? You could burn you own emulators and movies and pop it in and run it. It probably would of bought costs down and made the PSP cheaper, also if they wanted to do movies sooo badly for the PSP, if they did them on mini dvd, i expect most dvd players can play them, so they wouldnt restrict them to just the handheld.

[Mr.Denny]

I've yet to disagree with Dave!.

[Psyberjock]

I think Sony could have done better than the UMD, but it was a cheap solution to an existing problem at the time the PSP was first released, now almost 3 years ago.

I don't agree that Sony has to come up with some sort of profits sharing system. Sure it would be nice if they did, but why should they give money to people who don't sell games? They sell game systems, so of course they should profit from that. Do you think Apple gives stores money for all the iTunes downloads? NO! The stores just sell tons of iPods and iPod accessories. Probably half their money comes from those damn protectors, speakers, and headphones.

Perry you, my good sir, are a banana toasting moron.

[jamotto]

Think about it this way, how much better would it of been if they used mini dvd? You could burn you own emulators and movies and pop it in and run it. It probably would of bought costs down and made the PSP cheaper, also if they wanted to do movies sooo badly for the PSP, if they did them on mini dvd, i expect most dvd players can play them, so they wouldnt restrict them to just the handheld.

It's a nice idea, but if you want DVD quality video on a mini dvd you would be restricted by the 30 minute recording time. Unless you switch to VCR quality then you would then have 2 hour recording times.

[discombobulated]

I've always been a fan of carts ever since the NES days. We all know they're resilient as ****. UMD's look cool in a way but that's about it. I, for the longest time, figured the future of physical media as cartridges with memory cards getting smaller and higher in capacity. Of course, SD is expensive right now but it'll only get cheaper. But the problem with that is that game developers keep pushing the game size to the max capabilities of current technology keeping the cartridge format expensive. idk, just sharing some thoughts. I don't really see any better alternative than UMD's at the moment, especially since not everyone has a broadband connection suitable for downloading 1+ gig games in a quick manner.

[Qmark]

"by taking out all the motors and drives and stuff they have in there."

Ah, but here's the rub: Take out the UMD drive and go download-only, and the unit would need either a hard drive (with drives and motors all over again), or a functionally unaffordable 'solid-state drive' (meaning a high-capacity bank of flashram).

Going the HD route would make the PSP a ~$400 machine for the capacity of about twenty UMD's (assuming roughly 1gb/UMD), or a >$1000 machine with the same solid-state capacity. Neither of these would serve to make the machine any more 'secure' than it is now.


This screams elitism, possibly also antiwalmartism.

[Veskgar]

Why does everyone always piss and moan about UMD? IT'S A PORTABLE CONSOLE, EVERY PORTABLE CONSOLE HAS HAD A PROPRIETARY FORMAT! Get over it, for the love of God. No one ever says the NDS cart's are a waste of time, or the GBA carts, or, I dunno, every nintendo proprietary fromat from N64 back. People just love to jump on Sony about going out and trying new things.

I've always been a fan of carts ever since the NES days. We all know they're resilient as ****.

Funny you mention that. I was thinking too how my 20+ year old NES cartridges still work. Its a fight a lot of the time to insert the cartridge and have the NES read them. But that is mostly due to the low quality of the metal connectors inside the NES. The cartridges and games still work.

That's a very good point. I think a lot of it is how many people have seen the huge improvement in loading UMD backups off the memory stick. Then when you go back to UMD its agonizing waiting for the loading.

However, if SONY's UMD cache is efficient enough, it could revive people's opinion of UMD.

Also, for me to start putting my UMD's in as opposed to their corresponding backups, SONY will need to release a new version of the "STAMINA" battery for the Slim & Lite.

[Basil Zero]

hmm maybe this person should make a portable system of his own and have digital downloads