There are some points in favor of the Playstation 3 Slim for home theater junkies:
The first is that it can bitstream lossless 7.1 surround sound via HDMI. This may or may not matter pendent on your A/V/ reciever, since the Fat can still send 7.1 surround sound, it just has to be decompressed into linear PCM first.
The second is that it's Bravia Sync (CEC) compatible, meaning if you hook it up to your home theater via HDMI, you might be able to make use of fewer remotes while watching movies. The functionality will be somewhat limited though.
There's also a screen accessory Hori built for the slim if travel's ever a concern, albeit it's rather small/expensive and lord only knows how you'd actually power it on the road.
A little known favor in the point of the Fat models, at least for those who care, is that some of them can play the obscure SA-CD format, albeit with limitations.
txa1265 said:
Not only that, but in a wonderful (but typical for Sony) act of hubris, Sony loudly touted the backward compatibility of the PS3 ... then removed it quietly after the first version.
That's not entirely true actually, there were multiple versions of the Fat that had PS2 compatibility. I think the last model to have it was the 80G MGS4 bundle. It is true that PS3s produced after that, fat or slim, didn't have it anymore. I hear typical rule of thumb is to look at how many USB ports it has: if it has 4, it should have 'some form' of backwards compatiblity, if it has 2 it probably doesn't. (I'm not entirely 100% sure about this though and would recommend further research in some of the links othes have provided above.)
It is true that only the launch models had full backwards compatibility because they used an actual Emotion Engine, which was the GPU used in the PS2. Later units that have PS2 compatibility use software emulation in the E.E.'s place which makes their performance rather spotty in comparison, with slowdown, choppiness or outright freezing during certain points in certain titles. However in saying that I should also mention that these later units are also (marginally) less failure prone though.
One final note on backwards compatibility is really weird. Sony has to include updates to the firmware to give a controller permission to work in the PS2 mode. This is something they haven't done since they stopped producing backwards compatible models. This means that many controllers, including
officially licensed ones like the Hori Real Arcade Pro Premium VLX won't work with PS2 games. It's rather horrifying since Hori made backwards compatible joysticks in the past, especially considering the VLX's $300 price tag. This doesn't seem to apply to PS1 games though, thankfully rendering the point almost rather quite moot for my purposes.
On the other hand, any PS3 can play PS1 games making my preference almost rather quite moot as well. Still, playing Disgaea: Hour of Darkness at the couch using the PS3's blutooth wireless controller is still a rather quite cozy experience though and one pleasure you just can't get with the slim. I think it's especially nice with the Sixaxis since it's as light as a feather because it doesn't have the weight of the Dualshocks' Rumble motors pointlessly weighing it down.
BTW have you ever played Disagaea Ozreth? Based upon your stated preferences, it might just be worth swaying you to the Fat for the PS2 compatibility. In a nutshell it's a very fun PS2 game very much in the style of Final Fantasy Tactics, except with a greater emphasis on humor. Admittedly the units aren't as flexible as they are in FFT since you can't really mix and match most of the different abilities. However there's a lot you can do to increase the powerlevels of more or less everything, the Geo Symbol system adds a very interesting elements to the maps, the game's packed with lots of gameplay mechanics to manipulate and there are even randomly generated dungeons to explore in the form of item world...
