Los Angeles Sony unveiled its next PlayStation on Monday, a slim, stylish successor to its industry-dominating video game system.

Sony executives said their new PlayStation 3 has enough power to create movie-like visual effects in games the edge it needs to keep its position as the No. 1 player in the video game console market.

Kaz Hirai, president and CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment, said the new console system, which will be available by spring 2006, will deliver a quantum leap in games and other digital entertainment.

The coming-out party for the new PlayStation 3 was only days after rival Microsoft Corp. presented its new Xbox 360 system to the world late last week. Nintendo, the third major player in the video game hardware industry, is expected to show off today the Revolution, which is the successor to its GameCube system.

On Monday, Sony reasserted its dominance in the current console market, parading executives from major game publishers to testify to the current and future success of PlayStation.

Larry Probst, CEO and chairman of Electronic Arts, one of the largest game publishers and maker of the popular game "Madden NFL," said his company has sold 220 million units of software for both the original PlayStation and PlayStation 2.

"Today we are in transition mode preparing for the PlayStation 3," he said. "We think the PlayStation 3 will change the world of entertainment."

The PlayStation 3 will use a new microprocessor called Cell, which was first introduced in February, by Sony, IBM and Toshiba. The Cell processor can run multiple programs at the same time, and on the PlayStation 3, that means it can play games and high- definition TV and allow users to connect a camera to their console and broadcast over the Internet.

Engineers from Cell's companies have said the processor can run at speeds faster than 4 gigahertz, and Hirai said that in combination with a new graphics processing system from NVIDIA, the PS3 will be more powerful than the Xbox 360.

The Cell processor has enough power to decode and display 12 streams of high-definition video simultaneously.

Although Sony executives described the PlayStation 3's processing prowess in painstaking detail, they eventually moved from transistors and terraflops to several demonstrations, showing games with graphics rivaling the quality of movies like "The Incredibles" and "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within."

In speeches that sounded more like lectures on engineering rather than product briefings, Ken Kutaragi, president and group CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment America said the new system will be able to connect to a Wi-Fi wireless network, support several media formats, including CDs, DVDs, and a new high-capacity storage medium called Blu-ray disc ROM.

"For storing state-of-the-art programming, capacity is key," Kutagari told about 2,000 journalists and guests gathered at Sony's Picture Studios. "BluRay has six times the capacity of DVD."

Jen-Hsun Huang, president of NVIDIA, the hardware company making the graphics processor for the PS3, said the new visual technology, called RSX, is the most powerful ever designed. Hiuang said the new PlayStation is "clearly the most important digital device built this decade."

The RSX processor will be able to create high-definition graphics to a level of detail currently seen only in movies.

Huang said the goal of the high-powered processor is to be able to "articulate the subtle effects you see in real life."

Sony's new PlayStation will be able to display digital pictures, play digital music, and show digital video. Up to seven controllers will be able to connect through a Blue Tooth wireless connection.

The video game industry was a $10 billion business in 2004, the NPD Group, a market research firm, says.

Sony's PlayStation 2 dominates the market, with 84.5 million sold, including 35.4 million in North America. Microsoft has sold 13.2 million Xboxes in U.S. and 19.9 million worldwide. Nintendo is in third place with about 18.8% of the console market, according to the NPD group.

Copyright 2005, Journal Sentinel Inc. All rights reserved. (Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media.)

Copyright 2005 Journal Sentinel Inc. Note: This notice does not apply to those news items already copyrighted and received through wire services or other media
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