PS4 Slim And PS4 Pro: Everything You Need To Know

Published: 8 September 2016Updated: 31 October 2023
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Sony has stolen the march on Microsoft by releasing its latest consoles before its eternal rival.

Congratulations. You will now be able to buy PS4 Slim and PS4 Pro at your nearby hardware stores very soon because Sony’s latest gaming consoles have finally arrived.

It took months of speculation, some clever piece of journalism and of course a little work from the engineers working at Sony, but all that was worth it because the next generation of PlayStation gaming consoles is here.

The new consoles were announced by Sony at a press event which was held in Playstation Theater in New York City a couple of days ago.

Now, granted, holding a major product event the same day as Apple is nothing but a bold move but Sony managed to pull it off quite successfully. Luckily, Sony’s tech event was filled to the maximum with technology journalists who wanted a break from Apple’s, rather long, iPhone 7 event.

And of course, catching a glimpse of Nathan Drake is probably infinitely more entertaining than listening to Tim Cook.

But let’s pull back a little bit. You can’t buy the new consoles right now.

The Playstation Neo (or Playstation 4 Pro as it is called now and was also known as Playstation 4.5 before the official launch event) will become available at stores near you in the coming weeks.

This is probably the first console, ever, that can legitimately hold its own against a moderately powerful gaming rig.

The hard drive on the thing is a colossal 1TB one and Sony has significantly upgraded the console’s CPU and GPU.

In other words, the new console from Sony,Playstation 4 Pro, is a much more powerful gaming machine than any other gaming console on the market. And in case you still don’t know, you can also play PS2 games on PS4.

It is so powerful, that it can play your favorite games in 4K resolution without breaking a sweat. Well, it will probably sweat to some degree but you get the idea.

The Playstation 4 Pro is the first console ever that allows gamers to play games in 4K resolution. Of course, the previous sentence wouldn’t be complete without mentioning Xbox’s Project Scorpio which is also anticipated to be the most powerful console ever made. It too will be able to play games in 4K resolution.

But right now, we’ll focus on what we have and what we have is a brand new Sony Playstation console called PlayStation 4 Pro.

Perhaps we should also add that Sony could not have picked a better moment to introduce a 4K capable gaming console. The market is flooded with cheaper 4K TV’s so it made sense for the company to introduce a gaming console that could at least keep up with the TV’s if not surpass them.

You also give weight to the fact that 4K capable PCs are also becoming cheaper by the day. Many gamers have switched their gaming platform to PC just because consoles, even with their low price, could not provide 4K resolution gaming experience.

That seems set to change now.

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Someone managed to review the new PlayStation 4 even before the official launch date.

But that’s not all. Playstation 4 Pro will also be able to play games in HDR. In other words, the new console will add more detail to areas that are extremely bright and extremely dark.

As was the case with previous consoles, objects that were washed out by a speck of light or a really thick shadow are not more visible.

However, we should also mention that Sony also announced that the company will upgrade the original PS4 to be HDR capable as well.

That update will be shipped out to all original Playstation 4 consoles by the end of this month.

Apart from the new HDR facility, it was also revealed that the new Playstation 4 Pro would be able to upscale older games to 4K resolution.

Gamers will also be able to play new games at 4K resolution natively. Not only that, the new Playstation 4 Pro will also be able to play all your additional content such as videos or films, in 4K and HDR.

The new Playstation 4 Pro will also enable gamers to stream content live from services such as Netflix and Youtube.

Not enough?

Then how about the fact that the new Playstation 4 Pro will have the feature of forward compatibility with current Playstation titles.

Now it will be interesting to see how Microsoft, with its Xbox One S console, will try to compete with Sony’s Playstation 4 Pro because, currently, there aren’t any games on the market that can take advantage of Xbox One S’s ability to play games at 4K resolution and HDR.

Sony also has another advantage. And that advantage is the number of Playstation 4 games that will be ready for purchase at Playstation 4 Pro’s launch.

These games will take advantage of Playstation 4 Pro’s 4K capability through a simple patch which, as mentioned before, Sony will release by the end of the month.

Sony also announced that any game developer studio will be able to update its games to make them work with Playstation 4 Pro with the help of some minor tweaks.

What does that mean for gamers?

Well, it means that no matter the version of your Playstation console, you will be able to play almost all games on both PlayStation 4 Pro and the original Playstation 4.

After Sony’s event, we also know that Playstation 4 Pro will have the capacity to make games look better at resolutions 1080p and lower.

Sony did manage to provide a demonstration and the details in the game were significantly clearer. The game sample, on the PS4 Pro, showed a character that moved through some wild plants that weren’t present on the original Playstation 4.

So When Will I Be Able To Get Myself A Playstation 4 Pro?

Short answer: on November 10.

Long answer: on November 10 for $399.

Do remember that if none of the TV’s present in your house are capable of reaching resolutions that go beyond 1080p then the new Playstation 4 Pro is probably not for you.

Make no mistake, the new PS4 Pro is a fantastic piece of technology but maybe you don’t have the money right now for a monster gaming console.

If that’s the case then you can also go for another new Sony gaming console: The Playstation 4 Slim.

The Playstation 4 Slim will start shipping on September 15 and will be almost identical, in terms of horsepower, not the design, to the original Playstation 4.

It will have the same ports, output capabilities and hard drive (500GB).

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In fact, the only difference between the original Playstation 4 and the newer slimmer one is that, you guessed it, the new console is a thinner and more streamlined.

The Playstation 4, when it came out, was built like a monster truck. It was unnecessarily huge.

Sony learnt its lesson and now the new slimmer console is about an inch narrowers and an impressive three-quarters of an inch shorter.

It is also half an inch taller than the original.

But the best features which Sony, thankfully, remembered to improve were the power and eject buttons.

That’s right. The power and eject buttons are now actual buttons instead of being just vague touch zones.

Now gamers can power on and eject media from their slimmer console without much problems since now there is a visible distance between the two buttons. No more accidental power-offs when you actually wanted to eject the gaming disc.

You should also note that the new Playstation 4 Slim is called just the PS4 i.e there is no slim in the official name.

The new console from Sony will be available for purchase on September 15 for $299. Pretty sweet deal huh?

The new PS4 is the perfect gaming platform for those won don’t already have a gaming console  and don’t want to upgrade their Television sets to 4K ones anytime soon.

Don’t forget that if you want to experience PS VR (Virtual Reality) then you will need to have either a Playstation 4 Pro or a Playstation 4 slim.

The PS VR will launch in October of this year and is expected to have better technology along with a vastly superior gaming lineup when compared to the likes of HTC’s Vive and Oculus’ Rift.

It is probably true that HTC and Oculus both are ahead of Sony in terms of VR technology, but Sony has the upper hand because of its lineup of games for PS VR.

In other words, this isn’t the 1990s where Sony had little to no idea about how to dominate the gaming market. The company has done well to learn, from Nintendo perhaps, that the most important thing for a gamer, is games (and to win at those games).

If you want to pre-order your own Playstation 4 Slim then you can do that from here.

Refer to the charts below for a detailed analysis on Playstation 4 Pro and Playstation 4 Slim specs.

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And for the Playstation 4 Slim,

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Zohair

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