According to a new report, the PlayStation 5 roughly costs Sony Interactive Entertainment $450 to manufacture, suggesting the console could be priced at $500. The PS4 notably cost Sony less than $400 to manufacture, which was a big reason it could afford to position the gaming machine at $400 at launch. However, right now Sony is reportedly having issues securing a reliable flow of certain parts needed to create the console, which is driving up its manufacturing costs. Further, this has apparently lead to a cancelled feature.

More specifically, it's being reported that Sony was previously planning on including a new mirrorless camera with the PS5, but this had to be cancelled to a shortage of DRAM supply. Of course, this isn't a major feature for the console, but it does illustrate just how much this shortage of components is impacting the piece of next-gen hardware.

For those that don't know: a mirrorless camera, also called DSLM, is a camera that features a single, removable lens and that uses a digital display system rather than an optical viewfinder. Here, "mirrorless" is just a reference to the fact that the camera does not make use of an optical mirror or an optical viewfinder like you would see in a conventional digital single-lens reflex camera. Rather, it contains an electronic viewfinder that displays what the camera image sensor sees.

Now, it's unclear why Sony wanted to include this new camera with the PS5, but presumably it has something to do with the PlayStation VR 2, which is reportedly launching not that long after the next-gen PlayStation console.

Of course, all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. After all, it's unofficial information, plus Sony still has a small window to make changes before mass production begins in mid to late spring. That said, the report does come way of Bloomberg, which is to say there's much more weight behind it than most reports about the console floating around the Internet.



Posted: Feb 17, 2020 6:29 pm
Related Forum: PlayStation Forum

Source: https://comicbook.com/gaming/2020/02/14/ps5-playstation-5-feature-camera-cancelled/