playstation lcd screen made in china

First of all, this excludes the LCD combo pack. Didn"t want that and so I haven"t done any research on it. What I"m concerned with is the initially released standalone PSone in a silver box (yellow boxes indicate later models, all of which are made in China).

The LCD Screen (for PS one) is currently the only officially licensed monitor for the PS one that"s available on the retail market. There have been a few third-party manufactured PS one LCD screens that have seen their way onto retail store shelves thanks to companies such as Interact, Mad Catz and Electro Source, but until just recently we hadn"t seen one that came with the Sony seal of approval.

Does this really mean anything? Based on what we"ve seen of all the products, not really. The officially licensed moniker means a lot more when you"re dealing with things like memory cards and controllers because there"s a lot more reverse engineering going on because unlicensed third parties aren"t obliged to information about the console and how it works. But, in the case of an LCD screen for the PS one, it"s just a monitor that must work with the system"s output and be attachable to it. Not all that hard to do with or without Sony"s licensing.

At any rate, the Sony name generally stands for quality (let"s forget about the skipping PlayStations and the "Disk Read Errors" on the PS2 for a minute) and its official monitor, the LCD Screen (for PS one), is a top notch and well-built peripheral for the console.

When you pick up one of these units, you get yourself one of the LCD Screens, an AC Adaptor (the exact same kind that comes with the PS one unit), and an instruction manual. The screen is a 5" (diagonal width) Thin Film Transistor (TFT) liquid display and to the left and right of it you get 1 1/2 x 1 1/8 in 1.0 watt stereo speakers. Also on the front of the unit and below the screen you have button controls to adjust the brightness of the screen and the volume of the speakers.

The unit fits snuggly onto the PS one with the screws that are on its rear and looks completely stylish when mounted onto the console. It"s also extremely thin and lightweight, which really lends itself to being portable, which is what the screen and the PS one unit are intended to be.

The screen provides excellent video quality with very black blacks, very white whites and excellent color separation and overall picture quality. In fact, thanks to the reduced screen size and general clarity of the picture, most PlayStation games actually look better when being played on this PS one Screen than when played on a regular television set. It"s a lot harder to notice the low resolution of the textures and the general blockiness of polygonal models that are fairly common in most PlayStation games.

And despite the small size of the screen, you won"t experience any problems reading text in most text-heavy games like role-playing games. We were able to test Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, Legend of Dragoon, and Vagrant Story and found that the text in each of those games were completely legible. With Vagrant Story, the font"s unique style made it a little less clear than the others, but still didn"t prove to be a problem. The only times that we noticed issues with reading text was during some end-game credits where the text size was much smaller than normal.

If you take a look at the back of the unit you"ll see the DC In 7.5V connector, AV Multi connector (to connect it using a standard PlayStation AV cable to television), an AV IN jack, and a headphone jack.

Sadly, its AV IN jack is one that requires an SCPH-180 U AV connection cable that"s used to connect video equipment such as camcorders to the LCD screen and not standard stereo AV connections like you"ll find in some of the third party products. What this means is that you won"t be able to easily use this as a portable monitor for other consoles like the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Xbox, which is something that is possible with some of the third party units.

Sony has just celebrated its second year of selling the PlayStation 4 in China. The console originally launched in China mainland back in March 2015 and since then, Sony and rival Microsoft have been trying to grow the appeal of consoles in the country. With a population of over 1.3 billion, one may think that it wouldn’t be too hard to be successful in China, but the reality is very different. So far, consoles have struggled to sell in large quantities, yet Sony is doing better than any other console manufacturer in China.

One reason that consoles haven’t been big in China is because they’ve been banned since 2000 and it was only in 2014 that the ban was officially lifted. The ban was intended to protect Chinese youth from perceived harmful content found in video games, which were primarily on consoles at that time. Despite this, PlayStation, Xbox and Nintendo consoles were widely available during the years of the ban on the grey market, but China never became a console centric country. Most gamers were consumed with social, inexpensive, fun PC online gaming. Consoles were local-gaming experiences as they could not connect to a network while banned, and they were (and are) expensive to own by Chinese standards. The PlayStation 3 launch price was more than the average monthly salary at the time so it never really made much sense for consumers to purchase it.

Cost has been a huge challenge for both Sony and Microsoft in China. The Xbox One with Kinect launched at $570 USD in China and the PlayStation 4 launched for $450. With the average monthly salary at around $700/month, it’s no wonder the consoles weren’t flying off the shelves. Sony and Microsoft have been aiming to solve this issue with continued price reductions and now both consoles can be found for less than $350. Both companies have also attempted to boost the value of its consoles by bundling a set of games and services with each console. The PS4, for example, comes with 5 free games at the $319 price-mark, one of which is Ratchet and Clank, and three months of PS Plus access.

Sony can cut the price of hardware, introduce overseas AAA titles and localize content quickly, but that still doesn’t do much to convince gamers to buy a PS4. This year Sony has announced the China Hero Project as the next major strategy to grow the China business. The mission of the project is to fund Chinese developers to help them create global blockbuster titles with Chinese influence for launch on PlayStation platforms. 10 games have been announced in the first wave of the project, some of the games being entirely new concepts whereas others are games already in development for other platforms. Sony is hoping that the development of these games will not only grow the console market in China but globally as well.

Sony’s PlayStation 4 is designed to feel impenetrable. The machine — jet black, almost brutalist in shape — conceals its function to the untrained eye. Power on and disk eject buttons, as well as the actual disk drive, are almost invisible. It’s as if Sony hopes to imbue the object with a sense of mystery and awe. The PlayStation 2 played with similar emotions at the turn of the millennium, sitting bolt upright like the Monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey.But the most recent PlayStation looks more like the headquarters of a galactic government. Its secrets, though, couldn’t be more terrestrial, originating deep within Earth’s crust and at the hands of workers across the globe. Far from being detached from the environment, the PlayStation 4 is an object hewn from its materials and inhabitants.

As the climate crisis chastens and public awareness grows, environmental concerns have finally made their way to the video game industry. Sony recently signed up to the United Nations-backed initiative Playing for the Planet, while it’s broader “Road to Zero” initiative aims to “achieve a zero environmental footprint by the year 2050,” including goals to curb climate change, conserve resources, and promote biodiversity. But precisely how this squares with the company’s ongoing aim to sell hardware with short-term lives (the PlayStation 5 releases next year, effectively making its predecessor obsolete) remains to be seen.

We moved on to the console itself, and Durrell popped its top lid off with ease. This piece of plastic — black, ever so slightly dappled, with a glossy PlayStation logo positioned prominently in its center — is made from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS), which is the same cheap, hard-wearing material from which Lego blocks are made. An origin is engraved into the plastic: the Casetek Computer factory in Suzhou, a city with over 10 million inhabitants, which is referred to as the “Venice of China.” Because the ABS is labeled (along with most of the other materials within the console), it means it has a better-than-normal chance of being recycled, which falls in line with Sony’s recycling policy. Another company initiative aims to reduce virgin plastic in its products by 10 percent in 2020. But in 2018, virgin plastic used per product was actually up 2.4 percent from its 2013 figure.

Sony’s ABS, which pumps approximately 1.6 kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere for every PlayStation 4 manufactured, might have originated from China as part of the country’s expanding petrochemicals industry. But huge reserves can also be found in Venezuela, Canada, and a host of Middle Eastern countries. Once the oil has actually been mined, a complex process involving transport, refinery, and the plastic manufacturing takes place. “It’s energy-intensive,” Barlow soberly told me in the lab, “from top to bottom.”

Deeper inside the PlayStation 4, we came across a lot of steel, approximately 736 grams. Around 70 to 90 percent of steel gets recycled internationally, during which old parts are melted down, refined, and turned into new steel. This is what Barlow describes as “genuine recycling.” But because steel demand continues to rise, which means creating the metal alloy from ore, the proportion of recycled material in new steel sits at around 35 percent. In China, where the PlayStation 4 is made, it’s even less, clocking in at 20 percent. Still, from Sony’s point of view, the metal is cheap and structurally stable.

The economic efficiency with which the PlayStation 4 has been designed and subsequently manufactured is one of the machine’s most striking elements. We peered into the complex cogs of the Blu-ray drive, which is mostly made from a plastic called polyoxymethylene (POM) and is cheaper than hardier nylon plastic. The heatsink is made from aluminum, most likely because it’s a more cost-effective material than copper. The plastic ABS casing would have been created using injection molding, a process that results in very little waste material. Again, it’s cheaper for Sony and a little bit better for the environment, albeit relatively so.

Gold and tin are classified as “conflict minerals” by US legislation, a term that refers to resources originating from Congo and its neighboring countries. This region has faced ongoing violence for the past 30 years, funded in part, and amid many other complex factors, by its colossal mineral wealth, which is estimated at $24 trillion. Since 2010, publicly listed US companies have been required to check their supply chains for such minerals, their origins, and any risks associated with their extraction. We can’t be sure whether any of the tin or gold in the PlayStation 4 originated from this African region because Sony doesn’t publish its supply chain — unlike, say, Apple — but there’s cause for concern.

Earlier this year, Gamesindustry.biz combed Sony’s corporate documents to reveal 53 smelters or refiners (the companies that process metals, sometimes at the site of extraction) failing to meet the standards set by the Responsible Minerals Assurance Process, including sourcing practices. It’s feasible that some of these 53 smelters or refiners exist within what’s called a “covered country” (e.g., Congo and its adjoining countries), which means their mines could be, too. Working conditions at such mines are often pitiful, sometimes involving violence and child labor, and all for mercilessly little pay. It’s quite possible that the tin-based solder in your PlayStation 4, which is the glue holding its vital computerized parts together, originated from such deep exploitation.

The first point to bear in mind — because there are over 100 million PlayStation 4s out there, and AMD also produces chips like this for Microsoft’s own Xbox One console — is the scale at which these tiny objects are being produced. Such immense numbers become even more mind-boggling when you consider not only the intricacy of the actual manufacturing process but the conditions under which these microchips are made. Boyd told me it takes approximately 400 process steps to create chips like this in sparkling clean rooms inhabited by humans wearing iconic bunny suits and futuristic-looking robots.

Boyd described one incident in Asia where highly toxic fluorines escaped into the factory parking lot, and layers of employees’ windscreens started to literally disappear. “You can’t even imagine what’s happening to the people exposed to it directly in the air outside,” she said.

A different kind of terror lurks in the Chinese factories that actually assemble these machines. On the back of the PlayStation 4 we deconstructed in Cambridge, it simply read: “Made in China.” But other machines carry different text. At home, my console states: “Made in China MTK.” When I asked a friend to look at his PS4, he sent a grainy photo showing the text “Made in China FOX.”

A few days later, Barlow emailed me the results of her and Durrell’s findings. The equivalent of 89 kilograms of carbon dioxide is emitted into the atmosphere with the production and transportation of every PlayStation 4. I asked her if that was broadly in line with what she was expecting. “Yes,” she said simply. Certainly, the figure compares with other consumer electronic devices of its size and complexity, like a laptop. What if we multiply that number by 100 million, the number of consoles Sony has sold to date, would that be fair? “Yep,” she said again. Now we arrive at a more imposing number, one that feels like it captures the machine’s multitudes: the extraction and production of its raw materials, the global transportation of components, and the gigantic factories it’s assembled within. Since the PlayStation 4’s release in 2013, approximately 8.9 billion kilograms of carbon dioxide have been generated and subsequently released into the atmosphere. That’s more than all of Jamaica’s emissions in 2017. All for one little video game console.

What the figure doesn’t include is the energy consumed during the console’s use, so I purchased a plug-in energy monitor to test my own PlayStation 4. Over the course of an hour, Hideo Kojima’s new hiking simulator Death Stranding ate up 75 watts of electricity. If we estimate that average usage equates to roughly one hour each day, then a single player might generate 13.7 kilograms worth of carbon emissions throughout the year. If the player has owned their PlayStation 4 for the whole six years of its life to date, that’s 82.2 kilograms of carbon emissions, which is not far off the carbon footprint of the machine itself. Of course, if your electricity supplier is using a renewable energy source, then this point is null and void. But for the majority of us, our electricity will come from natural gas. (Only 17 percent of US electricity was renewably sourced in 2018.)

The PlayStation 4’s 8.9 billion kilogram carbon footprint leaves out other environmental impacts like pollutants that don’t end up in our carbon-soaked atmosphere. Take the controller’s lithium-ion battery, the same kind of chargeable technology powering electric cars. Lithium is produced by drilling holes into salt flats — usually found in massive crater-like lakes — and pumping brine to the surface. The important bit, lithium carbonate, is subsequently extracted through a chemical process. In recent years, pollution from the extraction process has led to the death of animals and crops, severely impacting local communities in countries like Argentina and China. The lithium that makes our controllers wireless is just another material that scars not only the landscape but the lives of those who call it home.

However forcefully Sony makes the case, the PlayStation 4 is not special. As Durrell said, the console is an “elegant piece of equipment,” but it’s also “much of a muchness” with other consumer electronics. When I asked Barlow how she might characterize the carbon footprint of consumer electronics, she offered just one word: “big.” Consider all of the other devices in the world, each with broadly similar carbon footprints using the same compressed carbon and shards of minerals formed over many millions of years. Workers might have been paid a pittance to extract, manufacture, and assemble those machines, too, with comparable industrial processes similarly impacting local environments. The numbers quickly rack up to an almost dizzying degree.

What was also remarkable about deconstructing the console was how quickly it transformed from a single object into an assembly of diffuse materials, each with their own histories, protagonists, and processes. As I think back to the cadaverous heap of metal, plastic, and electronics on the lab table in Cambridge University, it occurs to me that the PlayStation 4 has the most dazzling and problematic parts of global capitalism purring in unison. It is an exquisite, leanly designed machine pulsing with the exploitation of Earth and its people. I think lots of us know this, at least on some level, but our collective thirst for these carbon-hungry technologies remains unquenchable. Whether the planet can sustain such consumption is one question, but the ongoing human cost is another one entirely. For now, that’s the reality we must confront each time we boot up the jet black machine and plug ourselves back into the matrix.

It is my great pleasure to start off 2022 with news on our next generation virtual reality system for the PS5 console, starting with the official name: PlayStation VR2, and our new VR controller, PlayStation VR2 Sense controller.

PlayStation VR2 takes VR gaming to a whole new level, enabling a greater sense of presence and allowing players to escape into game worlds like never before. With the headset on and controllers in hand, players will feel a heightened range of sensations unlike any other – thanks to the creativity of the game worlds being built by our world class developers, and the latest technology incorporated into the hardware.

Building upon our innovations from PS5, PlayStation VR2 adds a true next-gen experience with high-fidelity visuals, new sensory features, and enhanced tracking – along with a simplified single-cord setup.

All of these advancements in PlayStation VR2, combined with thehaptic feedback and adaptive triggers from the PS VR2 Sense controllers, enable players to feel and interact with games in a much more visceral way. PS VR2 will also have a simple setup process — with a single cable connected directly to PS5, you can immediately jump into the VR experience.

Today we are also pleased to reveal that one of the biggest exclusive franchises on PlayStation will be coming to PS VR2 – Horizon Call of the Mountain from Guerrilla and Firesprite. This original game is being built specifically for PS VR2 and will open the doors for players to go deeper into the world of Horizon.

Sony Interactive Entertainment Inc."s PlayStation 5 gaming console is enjoying a boom among Chinese consumers following its release in China in mid-May.

In China, PlayStation 5 was rolled out about a half year after it went on sale in Japan in November. Pre-orders that began on April 29 were gone within three seconds. With demand far outstripping supply, it has become nearly impossible to buy one.

Sony launched the first PlayStation in 1994. PlayStation 2, introduced in 2000 with a built-in DVD player, was a global success and recorded worldwide sales of about 155 million units.

BEIJING (Reuters) - Japan’s Sony Corp and China’s Shanghai Oriental Pearl Group Co Ltd will set up two joint ventures to make and market Sony’s PlayStation games console in China, Shanghai Oriental Pearl said in a stock exchange filing on Monday.A logo of Sony Corp is pictured at an electronic store in Tokyo May 14, 2014. REUTERS/Toru Hanai