HANDS ON GUIDE

Setup

Like the 360, there are several versions of the PS3. At launch, Sony blessed the British with a unit featuring a 60GB hard disk, four USB 2 ports and a flash card reader, plus backwards compatibility with PS2 games. This is the version we tried, but it has since been replaced by a design that drops two USB 2 ports, the card reader and PS2 compatibility, and has a 40GB hard disk. Both models have a Blu-ray optical drive, 802.11b/g WiFi and Gigabit Ethernet, along with an HDMI port, optical S/PDIF and a proprietary AV output. The PSU is internal.

At first glance, the contents of the PS3's box don't compare well with those of the 360, the biggest absence being a high-definition video cable. All you get is a composite lead, through which your shiny PS3 will produce some distinctly murky graphics at the retrograde resolution of 576i (720 x 576), rather than the 720p (1,280 x 720) most HDTVs support. There's no headset included either. However, much of the PS3's hardware is industry standard, which isn't something we're used to saying about Sony products. The single wireless gamepad has a built-in rechargeable battery, and charges using a standard USB-to-mini-USB cable. You can use any Bluetooth headset, too.

When setting up the PS3, we found it deeply unpredictable. While the gamepad can turn the console on and off, as the 360's does, the one in the box must be synched manually with the PS3 before you can use it wirelessly. Far more irritating is the PS3's failure to detect an HDMI connection automatically - we had to trawl through system menus, and set it manually to output 720p through HDMI. Admittedly, you need to do this with a PC too, but aren't consoles supposed to 'just work'? We also had to check manually for a system update - even Vista does this automatically.

The resolution woes don't end once you've set up the HDMI connection. If you turn it off at the mains, the PS3 sometimes forgets which controllers and AV outputs it's supposed to use. Some TVs, such as our Philips, detect the blackness of its game loading screens as a change in resolution, causing 'no input' messages to appear and the kind of annoying flickering that belongs to the era of the Lumiere Brothers rather than that of pixels and processors.

The PS3 goes online as easily as the 360, as it also uses DHCP. It's far less insistent on you creating an account for its online system, the PlayStation Network. The option is there, though, and as with the 360, you can use a USB keyboard. There's a lot less to the PS3's online account than the 360's - once you've grabbed a name, given it an email address and password, and picked a profile picture, you're done until you find some friends with PS3s. There's no PC interaction either.

Setting up the Wii was simple. The console has no standard video or audio outputs, so you're reliant on the proprietary composite video and RCA stereo cable. As with the other two consoles, there's a single controller and AA batteries to power it, along with a wrist-strap to stop you hurling it into orbit and a sensor bar to read the controller's movements. The Wii has a small external PSU and built-in 802.11b/g WiFi, along with DHCP support (but no built-in wired networking), two USB 2 ports and an SD card slot for adding storage - there's no hard disk. The only real complication with setup was making the display look good on our Philips LCD TV: you need to set the Wii manually to run in widescreen, and we also had to tweak the position of the picture. As its video output options are limited to composite, SCART and component, all you get is a 576i signal. Still, it looks far better than the PS3 did at this resolution, as the Wii has been designed to run at standard TV resolutions.

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