Sony has announced the Sony PlayStation Pro (formerly known by the ‘Neo’ code name) and has said that it will support UltraHD gaming and also with support for HDR. However, it will not support UltraHD Blu-ray disk playback. It will sell in the US for $399 (£349 in the UK) from November 10th. There will also be another lower cost version, the PlayStation 4 Slim that will cost $299 and be available in mid-September.
Both consoles will be fully interoperable, although some games may be optimised for the UltraHD output, which has been enabled by a new AMD GPU that is claimed to have double the rendering power of the previous model. It also has a 1TB disk drive and a faster CPU. The CPU is an upgraded 86-64 Jaguar 8-core AMD CPU along with a 4.2 teraflop AMD Radion GPU. It also includes three USB ports, HDMI 2.0a and 5GHz WiFi support.
Sony also said that existing PlayStations would be upgraded to support HDR by a firmware upgrade.
Analyst Comment
It’s more than a little surprising that Sony hasn’t supported 4K Blu-ray, given that Microsoft already does that with the XBox One S (although that console doesn’t support UltraHD gaming). I might have been tempted, myself, just so that I can test (as I am still very happy with my Panasonic 1080P plasma TV). (BR)
