Sony PlayStation 2 - Charocal black

I owned two PS2 units, one of them 1st gen, the other 2nd gen... and both of them performed really nice... until the day in which the DVD-ROM simply stops recognizing the game disk. In the case with my first PS1, the drive just died, period (no disk was playable whatsoever). The second one, the drive was able to play certain disks, but suddenly it would lose grip of the disk, and the disk would start making weird noises while spinning + the game would freeze in the middle of a scene. Very annoying, as it does not let you save before it does that... What is remarkable in the case with the dying drive is the actual timing. The drives died on me after exactly 1 year and 2 months of use. Meaning, exactly when the warranty was up! Repairing the console would cost you almost as much as buying yourself a new one...

If I was a person who believed in conspiracy theories, I was going to think that Sony put some kind of "time bomb" chip in the drive, to invalidate it, to force the user to buy a new console... Umm!!!

Anyway, I think the PS2 is a great platform, especially content-wise. At the time it was also the quality leader out there, hands down. Also I love the Sony brand and it pains me to give such a low rating to their flagship product. But their technical issues cost me a lot of money so Sony Corp. does need to get their act together in order to remain competitive.

If you are interested in buying a PS2, maybe you will never have problems like the ones I had, but then again, what are the odds of having two brand new consoles die on the same person in the exact same way, after the exact same amount of time of moderate usage? Buy at your own risk, and consider yourself warned.