Sony Releases Firmware 1.80 for PS3: “Wow” Included Standard

So before I get real busy here, detailing all of the new features that PS3 now has in its arsenal, let me cover the absolute basics:

Yes, it still costs $599 USD and it still doesn’t have vibration feedback in the Sixaxis controller. Please leave your smartass, dated jokes at the door before you read this… It’s actually pretty awesome.

Regardless of how you may feel about the two aforementioned issues, the newly released 1.80 PS3 firmware has a whole arsenal of new features that every PS3 owner can get excited about. Sony finally fixed a long-running problem with the PS3’s Blu-ray playback. Before, if you weren’t watching your Blu-ray movies in 1080i or higher, you weren’t watching Blu-ray in high definition. 720p was not an option, and there was no real reason for it. This issue has been resolved, and everyone can officially enjoy their Blu-ray Discs in 720p, as God meant for a whole bunch of televisions.

For starters, PlayStation 3 is now DLNA-compliant (that’s Digital Living Network Alliance). That’s a big, fancy name for “the ability to stream media straight from your computer to your DLNA-compliant receiver”. Your PS3, in this case. DLNA differs from Microsoft’s 360 Connect in several key ways. Firstly, DLNA is operating system-independent. You can use Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or even Linux if that’s what you run on your system. Secondly, you’ll have to find a program that works with your particular OS, and there’s quite a few good ones out there for whatever you run. Most of them are totally free, too. Once you’ve got all that set up, it’s very simple to connect your computer to your PS3 and stream all of your media from your PC to your PS3, without ever transferring that content directly to the console.

Sony also beefed up the Remote Play function included on PS3 and the PlayStation Portable as well. You are now not confined to a local network to use the Remote Play function on your PSP. You can access the content that’s on your PS3 hard drive on your PSP, from anywhere in the world with a Wi-Fi connection that you can access with your PSP. While you can certainly enjoy the standard, socially-acceptable content, the possibilities for porn in a public setting cannot be ignored with this. (I just sold a whole bunch of PSPs for Sony. Right there.)

As a bit of an oddity, you can also connect a select group of Epson printers to the PlayStation’s USB port and print pictures directly from the hard drive. Finding the space to fit a PlayStation 3, credit card reader, and Epson printer is entirely up to you, though.

No doubt the biggest, and most awesome individual aspect of the 1.80 firmware is the true demonstration of PlayStation 3’s upscaling abilities. If you have your PS3 connected via HDMI, you can upscale DVD movies all the way up to 1080p. If your PS3 is connected with component or HDMI, you can upscale your PSone or PS2 games all the way up to 1080p as well.

I didn’t make a mistake.

Full 1080p as a maximum for DVD movies, and all legacy PlayStation games is now included as part of the emulator software in PS3. Much like the PS2 did, the PS3 emulator allows you to turn on a “smoothing” filter that helps your games look awesome on a high-definition screen. The difference isn’t as noticeable on some games, but for others it can be night and day.

So all in all, firmware 1.80 for PS3 is a massive update, delivering what the fans have been wanting for a while now. I bet that makes the $599 price tag and lack of vibration feedback a lot easier to handle, huh?