New PS4 Smell

Can you turn the light off at the back of the controller?

Perhaps that would improve the woeful battery life.

It would be ridiculous if you couldn't turn it off since the majority of PS4 owners won't have PS Eye and therefore it'd be wasting energy for no additional functionality (indeed i'm sure the light bleed would get annoying when playing in darkened environments).

 

Open the controller and remove the LED. A worthy experiment

 

Louder than my slim PS3 but probably not as loud as my old Phat though that might change during the summer.

Cheers

 

You don't have to guess, it was measured slightly quieter than the original slim.

 

My PS4 is quite a bit quieter than my PS3 slim, which was quieter than my launch PS3. During gameplay (BF4), it barely gets any louder.

I did some power draw measurements:
Powered off - Didn't register (0.05w or less)
Standby - 10-11w
PDM (PS Dynamic Menu) - 85w
Gaming (BF4) - 123-131w
Gaming (BF4) + PDM - 140w

My BF4 disc was in the entire time (dunno if that affects anything).

Also timed my startup from standby (no downloads) and from powered off using an HGST 7K1000 1TB 7200RPM HDD:
Standby: ~22s
Powered off: ~20s

Apparently if a download is active in standby, it will startup almost instantly. While in standby, I can faintly hear something running (HDD?). Didn't test the startup times with the stock HDD.

PS4's auto RGB range setting is pretty much useless. Set my Panasonic to RGB Full and Auto output Limited range. Auto settings never seem to work on any device or display in my experience... I always recommend setting them manually.

Anyway, after 1.5 hours of BF4 and playing around with my new PS4, I haven't experienced a single problem yet.

 

Firmware 1.51 is coming http://blog.us.playstation.com/2013/11/19/ps4-system-software-update-1-51-coming-soon/

 

Thats the best bundle out there, hope they bring that here too, as we usually get whatever Europe gets.

So good to see all of you guys getting ur ps4s.......for me the wait continues >.<

 

It's still used in games for a variety of indicators. But I could imagine it would become an optional setting like vibration that could be turned on or off in most games.

 

That won't make much of a difference for battery life. LEDs draw very little power.

Still a option to turn them off would be nice.

 

Actually, LEDs draw quite a lot of power, which is why the screen lightbar in a cellphone or tablet is by far the biggest consumer of power in the system, and in laptops, the second biggest after the CPU/GPU (if present).

If you open up a move controller, you'll find that the glowstick has a battery roughly 300% larger than in the navigation thingy, largely because of the LEDs (as the rumble motor won't be doing anything most of the time, while the LEDs glow constantly.)

 

Somebody open up their controller and rip out the LED for battery tests! Do it! ... For Science!

 

I'm on it once I'm back home.

 

That surprised me so I looked it up. Turns out there are indeed LEDs that consume a lot of power.

If it is the cause of the shorter battery life, then I find it strange that Sony would leave them on by default.

 

I thought some people might be curious about the update process. Here is how long it takes to go from 1.50 to 1.51:

Download Time: Unknown (was already downloaded when I stopped home for lunch).
Preparing to Install: 1m 37s
Reboot to Safe Mode: 0m 47s
Safe Mode Install: 0m 17s
Reboot to Login: 0m 31s
Total Time from Pressing "Start" on the update screen to being back at the login screen ready to go: 3m 13s

1m 18s was spent on reboots, 1m 54s on the install process.

 

I think it's to avoid remarks/complaints of much shorter battery life whenever the camera is present and enabled and the lightbar is glowing, so sony just burns the LEDs all the time to get a consistent user experience. My speculation I admit, but I think there's some logic to it...

 

LEDs surely eat a lot of battery life.

Ever used a PS Move controller?

I vividly remember ordering that charging dock very quickly after my first few tries at motion gaming ...