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Sony PS3 will support 4K stills, not video

The PlayStation 3 will handle ridiculously hi-res still images soon, thanks to an update. Your holiday snaps will never look the same again.

Joe Svetlik Reporter
Joe has been writing about consumer tech for nearly seven years now, but his liking for all things shiny goes back to the Gameboy he received aged eight (and that he still plays on at family gatherings, much to the annoyance of his parents). His pride and joy is an Infocus projector, whose 80-inch picture elevates movie nights to a whole new level.
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Joe Svetlik
2 min read

Here's some good news for fans of holiday photo slideshows: the PlayStation 3 will soon be able to show off 4K stills. That's four times the resolution of HD. Yikes.

Sony made the announcement at the Japanese CEATEC show, Engadget reports. Sony also showed its nuts VPL-VW1000ES projector in a slide, along with devices capable of supplying high enough resolution images to it. And one of those is a PS3.

A firmware update will come early 2012 enabling the games console to output the required 4096x2160 resolution, Sony announced. But the bad news is it's only for stills, not video. So ultra-HD games are a way off yet, it seems.

Of course you'll need a set or projector capable of displaying images this sharp in order to see the benefit. Sony's VPL-VW1000ES should do the trick -- it's capable of crazily high resolution in the home, whereas most have been exclusively designed for digital cinemas. Careful you don't cut yourself on those sharp visuals though -- it beams them at up to 200-inches across and is also 3D.

What's that? The price? A steal at about £16,000.

Back in January JVC showed off a prototype 4K camcorder at CES, and in the summer of 2010 YouTube added the ability to support 4K videos. There's an Onkyo AV receiver that'll upscale your 1080p vids to 4K, but generally 4K TVs and projectors are pretty thin on the ground. Still, it's beyond HD, so expect to start hearing a lot more about it soon.

Just over a year ago the PS3 received a firmware update allowing it to run 3D Blu-rays.

Image credit: Engadget.