Don’t panic. A few early reports, from a few lucky console owners do not necessarily make for a widespread problem. This might develop into nothing serious but the number of units struck with this issue, in ratio to the number of units that are actually out in the wild, makes this worth reporting – even at this early stage.
Some of the PlayStation 4 consoles, delivered to outlets like Kotaku and IGN, have already broken. Stephen Totilo of Kotaku writes “the first retail unit that Sony provided me failed to work when I plugged it into a TV in Kotaku’s office.” Upon further investigation, he and a colleague diagnosed the problem by comparing with another console they had which worked and deduced that “the bad unit had a faulty HDMI jack that we couldn’t fully plug an HDMI cable into.”
A couple of the winners of Taco Bell’s promotion that were lucky enough to receive PS4 consoles before the official North American release have also reported what sounds like a very similar issue. One user on Reddit has offered a little bit more detail. His console turned on but the pulsing blue light on the front, which turns white when the system boots, simply continued to pulse blue. There was no output on his TV.
IGN has posited the idea that this might have been related to the firmware update 1.50 after one of their machines worked before the update and not after it. With other users reporting dead consoles straight out of the box, that possibility seems unlikely.
It sounds more likely that this is an issue caused by a bad connection to the HDMI port on the PS4’s motherboard which causes the HDMI socket itself to move while in transit – or perhaps not make a proper connection during manufacturing.
We’re sure this is an issue Sony is looking into and would hope to find a resolution to as quickly as possible. We’ll know much more after Friday, when hundreds of thousands of brand new PlayStation 4 consoles are in the eager hands of consumers across North America. Let’s hope it’s an issue with a single batch and doesn’t become a bigger problem that could cause us Europeans – with our later release date – to reconsider those precious pre-orders.
UPDATE: Shuhei Yoshida, President of Sony Worldwide Studios has tweeted the following:
Be assured we are investigating reported PS4 issues. The number is very small compared to shipped, we believe they are isolated incidents.
— Shuhei Yoshida (@yosp) November 14, 2013
dee
I have to be honest between this and the average scores im starting to consider goin over to the dark side.
Kennykazey
Don’t expect that to be any different.
beeje13
Oh noes!
I had a similar issue with my PS3 (40GB 2008 model, still using the same one, blu ray drive failed but under warranty). The ethernet port did not work out of the box unless the cable is held (or taped) at an angle, and still does not work to this day. Your suggestion of faulty connection to motherboard never occured to me, but makes sense….
TSBonyman
It did cross my mind when i saw the PS4 tear-down the other day, how all the ports are on this single main board so everytime you plug something in or out, there is a potential danger of causing damage over time.
It would probably be more expensive and fiddly to assemble but i would really prefer any input ports to be mounted inside the casing and connected to the main board with cables.
Let’s hope the issues are indeed isolated but i’ll be going for an extended warranty just in case.
Moonpie
fingers crossed, no need to panic. If lots of people report the problem after US Release then maybe but feeling positive.