Only a few days ago, I had the bittersweet (confounded screws!) pleasure of upgrading my hard drive in my PS3, and was over the moon because of that. Now that the HDD space was gargantuan between my PS3 and laptop, the next logical step was to move some stuff off of my Laptop, and onto my PS3. Before I began on that arduous task, I checked how much space I had left on my Laptop HDD:



‘Whoa’, I uttered. During the past few months, my torrenting did increase significantly, but I did not know it reached this kind of level, for the year I owned this laptop, only today did it reach the fifty percent full mark. After a little investigation, it was the HD movies I downloaded that were the real gig eaters, and combined, they totalled 30-35 gigs. The rest of the used gigabytes fell into music and games, as expected. I decided to transfer a few movies onto my PS3, but fully expected it just to be a back-up device, not a movie player. So, I decided to use my old, but gold memory stick:



Now that the surrogate mother was decided (wink) FF:Advent Children was copied onto the memory stick. On Insertion into my PS3, as expected, it allowed me to copy the file and I did, a black square representing the icon for it. At this point, I just thought that it was the default icon for file types the PS3 did not recognize, and was a little deflated. I really wanted to watch the film on my big HDTV, rather than my 15 inch laptop screen. Yeah I didn’t even realize their was info at the side of it, detailing what file type it was and how long the film was, I too busy, ridiculous, ey? I copied Ironman, and then this came up:



The icon played about 15 seconds of the movie, and I was shocked. Yet again, I said whoa, pressed X and the movie started. It was safe to say at that point I uttered a word that rhymed with grit, and was both flabbergasted and joyful that I found this feature of the PS3, however the best was about to come. When the movie played, I noticed immediately that everything looked a lot sharper, and a lot more colourful than on my laptop. Yup, the file was upscaled, thanks to the PS3. Though Ironman did look a little rough:




However, FF looked amazing, maybe due to it being CGI, but the PS3 did a wonderful job of the upscaling:



I was overjoyed, but thought it was extremely stupid of me never to do this before, the thought never crossed my mind, and the free space of my laptop never dropped below 80 gigs. Even though I was overjoyed, a doubt came into my mind, a real annoyance of the PS3. When playing a DVD, the PS3 automatically signs you out of PSN, and you can’t have the pleasure of watching a movie whilst waiting for something to download off of the store. Why hasn’t sony released a patch to sort this out, I do not know, but it’s an annoyance that can be sorted out easily enough. So, I hesitantly pressed the PS button, expecting a black screen with the option to quit playback, what I got made me smile like I have rarely smiled before:


Ironman looks a little better.




YES!!! I thought, finally I can watch movies and not sacrifice the ability to download a game or video whilst watching. I quickly shuffled over to the download management screen and breathed a sigh of relief, Bionic Commando Rearmed was still downloading.


So, there you have it, even after a year of owning one, I’m still discovering the awesome features of the PS3, and you’d think after a year of owning a console, you would know it inside out. Not in my case, seeing as I use my PS3 as a media machine as well as playing games, this feature will make my movie watching that much sweeter, sony might being killing themselves with the awful advertising of the PS3, but it seems the people who make the tech/software at sony are still doing a damn fine job.


Have a nice day/night, guys/gals