Hands-on with Netflix on the PS3

Setup is painless. Select the Netflix icon from the "Video" icon of the XMB interface, and the PS3 will start a quick download of the new Netflix program. Enter your Netflix subscription info and the new interface pops up.

While the PS3's old interface got the job done, the new interface is a joy to use. There's a left-hand menu that includes sorting categories, such as "Genre" and "New Arrivals."

When you jump into each section, you see additional rows of movies and if you hover the cursor over a movie, you get additional information like runtime and Netflix's guess as to how much you'll like the movie.

You can still browse your Instant Queue like before, but now you can even search straight from the interface.

The search results update as you type, which mitigates most of the frustration of using an onscreen keyboard, since we generally only had to type a few letters to hind what we were looking for. Our only nitpick is there currently isn't a way to filter movies by video quality; a simple "HD" filter would be appreciated.

Like the previous interface, selecting a movie gives you a synopsis and additional movie information.

The suggestions section has several in-depth filters based on what Netflix thinks you'll like.

While Netflix streaming has always had passable video quality, videophiles could find plenty to complain about. Even HD streams had plenty of visible compression artifacts, especially in scenes with lots of camera motion. We looked at a few of Netflix's HD programs, including "The Office", "Archer" and "Space Cowboys". Overall, we were impressed, as the new HD content looks significantly better than what was previously considered "HD". We could still see some noise and compression artifacts in backgrounds--we noticed plenty of false contouring in the sky at the beginning of "Space Cowboys"--but it only shows up during a handful of scenes. On the whole, it's on par with what you'd expect from most cable HD channels, which also feature compression.