27th March 2011, 3:58 AM
Define "soon". I expect they'll have a new model in a year or two. It's Moore's Law that they'll be able to shrink down the components. I don't need the system itself to be smaller. It's just a matter of shrinking down the chips on the board so they require less power to run. That happens all the time even without major "updates". The 360 for example had 4 or so revisions even before the one that they actually advertised, and all of them involved things like combining chips and shrinking dies and new processes and so on. The later ones actually used a different power supply that isn't compatible with the earlier ones because of this. In fact, remember that Game Gear of mine, the one that wasn't the Majesco remodel but an earlier remodel when Sega was still making it? Yeah, turns out looking inside both they combined two chips into one there too.
As for CRT vs LCD. "One of" is now "the only". Any other reason you could name has pretty much been eliminated by current technology. Viewing angles, black levels, and so on have all been dramatically improved. The native resolution issue however, that goes down to the very basics of LCD design. That's not something that can ever actually be removed, and so CRTs will always be better in that respect. Fortunately, so long as a resolution is perfectly divisible into a screen's "native" resolution, that isn't an issue. Unfortunately, in the case of the 3DS and previous DS games, that isn't the case, so yes, a filter gets used. It's annoying. I'll have to see how big the screen actually is. If the screen size is big enough, maybe that really big shrinking effect still leaves it at the same size as a DS screen. In defense of LCD screens, for TVs the "native resolution" problem isn't really a problem. Those are set up generally so that TV resolution slides right into the HD resolutions, so it isn't an issue. It's just a matter of keeping the old aspect resolution when playing those old games. For computers, it's trickier. A good LCD screen will allow you to maintain the right aspect resolution and "double" the image until it fits but without needing a filter. Sometimes this leaves black bars above and below, but they are generally small and easy to ignore. This eliminates the native resolution problem without resorting to a filter pretty well.
As for CRT vs LCD. "One of" is now "the only". Any other reason you could name has pretty much been eliminated by current technology. Viewing angles, black levels, and so on have all been dramatically improved. The native resolution issue however, that goes down to the very basics of LCD design. That's not something that can ever actually be removed, and so CRTs will always be better in that respect. Fortunately, so long as a resolution is perfectly divisible into a screen's "native" resolution, that isn't an issue. Unfortunately, in the case of the 3DS and previous DS games, that isn't the case, so yes, a filter gets used. It's annoying. I'll have to see how big the screen actually is. If the screen size is big enough, maybe that really big shrinking effect still leaves it at the same size as a DS screen. In defense of LCD screens, for TVs the "native resolution" problem isn't really a problem. Those are set up generally so that TV resolution slides right into the HD resolutions, so it isn't an issue. It's just a matter of keeping the old aspect resolution when playing those old games. For computers, it's trickier. A good LCD screen will allow you to maintain the right aspect resolution and "double" the image until it fits but without needing a filter. Sometimes this leaves black bars above and below, but they are generally small and easy to ignore. This eliminates the native resolution problem without resorting to a filter pretty well.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)