All of Sony’s Awful Proprietary Ports, Ranked

Over the years, Sony has shown its commitment to offer new and ridiculous ownerships alongside products defining industry as the original Walkman and PlayStation. Many of them have been a generalized success, such as the Blu-ray, or had meaning for the time, like the Audio Audio Codec which made the mini-disque viable; Some Sony’s worst ideas concerned material connectors.

So let’s take a look at some of the biggest crimes in the company against cables, ports and connectors.

8

Multiple

The Multi of Sony first appeared in the PlayStation console, where it was used to transport an analog signal from the console to a television. Sony has taken over the connector for analog video transport in the PS2 and PS3. It was an owner production which was limited to game consoles (with limited evidence of a few Japanese televisions that also use it).

But Sony is hardly alone in this area, with almost all the time consoles that adopt the same approach. Microsoft used a similar tip with the Xbox 360, just like Nintendo with the Wii U, which has always supported the analog output to the output in 2012. Multi-AV was a perfectly acceptable connector for time, in particular considering that it could transport composite, S-Video, RVB and components signals.

7

Sony Ericsson CST-15

The CST-15 is the connector that appeared on the phones of the characteristic of Sony Ericsson which were popular in the early 2000s, up to the dawn of the smartphone era. I can say with confidence that these chargers were absolutely rotten, but I am happy to give Sony a pass in view of the state of the market at the time. Each company of the time used a horrible charger owner of a certain kind, because it was long before the USB load was standardized between brands.

Even so, if you had a Sony Ericsson who used one of these chargers, you will undoubtedly remember how fragile they were. Not only was the cable itself rigid, Plasticky and subject to blurring, but the connector failed to withstand the rigors of daily use. As a result, I had to replace several Sony Ericsson mobiles because they simply refused to load.

6

A / V cable of the Sony 10 -pin camcorder

Obtaining an analog signal from a camcorder to a TV or a video recorder to look back or capture your videos at home generally requires the use of a RCA to carry a composite video on the yellow connector and separate the left and right audio channels on the white and red cables. Having three separate ports on a camcorder occupies too much space, many manufacturers have used a rupture cable to manage this.

While camcorders like JVC were happy to stick to the 3.5 mm connector commonly used generally used for headphones and audio, Sony had other ideas. The A / V cable of the Sony 10 -pin camcorder was born to take an analog video and a sound to a television or a capture device. What is strange is that this connector was always used until recently, with the “most recent” camcorders announced on the Sony website (such as the AX43A 4K Handycam) announcing its use. It should be noted that all these cameras seem to have been interrupted and that the cable is sold separately.

Sony began putting the wearing of digital media (DMP or DMPort) on its audiovisual receivers in early 2007, with a range of accessories very shortly after. This first range of complementary modules was made up of the TM-BT1 Bluetooth adapter, an iPod TDM-IP1 quay, the TDN-NW1 Walkman cradle and the Cradle Cher TDM-NC1 for the Wi-Fi adapter for Audio streaming from a PC (which costs $ 200 at the time).

Engadget has thought about whether or not the DMP would be “something other than a glorified USB port” and retrospectively, this seems to be an appropriate description. It is logical that you cannot connect any Bluetooth or Wi-Fi adapter to your expensive Sony receiver, so DMP was probably considered as a method of corresponding products compatible with each other using another owner connector.

4

WMC-NW20MU

Unused towards the middle at the end of the 2000s, the WMC -NW20MU connector was used to load and connect Sony Network Walkman models with catchy names like the NWZ -S636F, S703F and – which could forget – the S718FBNC. You have to connect one of them frequently enough to keep your MP3 JUICED player and transfer new music. This is particularly true, considering that many of these players have used flash memory with capacities of a few gigabytes or less. At the other end of the cable was a standard USB-A connector, while the WMC connector itself was much thinner (I bet it has vacillated in no time).

It was not exactly unique for the time, in particular given the popularity of Apple’s iPod, which used an equally thin and fragile connector (which finally tainted even the iPhone and iPad). However, at least the Apple product range was popular. I had an MP3 player in the Iriver hard drive at the time (bought even earlier in 2005), which used a USB mini-connector. I only saw this to demonstrate that a more “universal” option was available for companies, if they wanted.

3

PS Vita load cable

The PS Vita was published in 2011 as a monitoring of the portable PlayStation (PSP), with subsequent revisions. Perhaps the most confusing choice of Sony, apart from not adequately supporting the console with enough titles of the first part, was the decision to use a proprietary load cable. Instead, you should load your pocket computer with a surprisingly fatty cable but with blows, which would also act like one in one for USB file transfers so that you can move media like images and music in the days preceding the cloud-all.

It must be said that Sony was not alone here, Nintendo continuing to use its own similar connectors to the output of the Nintendo switch. That said, there is no excuse for one or the other company to do this in the early 2010s, at a time when the micro-USB standard (certainly terrible) was well established. Being limited to a single charger would have been a problem because you will have to transport it with you rather than count on the cables you may already have for your destination.

Sony finally “solved” the problem by abandoning the owner connector of the PS Vita Slim model in favor of the aforementioned cursed micro USB connector.

2

Home Theater in a Box speaker connectors (HTIB)

I am not afraid to admit that I have never heard of Sony’s “Home Theater in a Box” initiative that very recently, but it is not necessarily a bad thing. These systems do exactly what they say on the box: Provide everything you need to build a surround sound system in a unique set. The idea here is to eliminate the conjecture of the correspondence of a receiver with satellite speakers and a subwoofer, but somewhere along the way, Sony seems to have panicked and designed another owner connector.

These are not the speakers of your grandfather and are rather designed to operate with only the speakers included. There are old reddit threads with users perplexed on their existence, where commentators wonder if we could “use alligator clips and a normal speaker wire on each pin” or “open and weld in certain standard caps”.

It seems that you can simply cut the connector and use the wires of standard speakers, but the overwhelming opinion of the Internet is that these systems are not worth disturbed. Better use of your time could be to determine if you really need an AV receiver in this modern time.

1

Memory stick

Memory Stick was Sony’s attempt to create her own removable flash memory format, after having appeared for the first time in 1998. You may think that the memory stick is technically “media” and may not belong to an article on owner ports, but considering that many Sony laptops and other products were decorated with memory sticks, I choose to include them here. I am not often paid to complain about something so bad, so I get my blow.

The idea of a removable owner storage medium is quite odious, but it is Sony’s position on the market as a business that made a wide range of products (many of which were good) that allowed the company to get away for so long. At the time, if you wanted to add more memory to your operating phone Sony Ericsson or PlayStation Portable, you will have to buy the relevant extension of the memory stick. There was simply not an alternative but to give Sony more money.

But that is getting worse, because these slots also appeared on Wega and Bravia televisions, VAIO laptops and office PCs and Walkman brand audio players. The technology was authorized in Epson for printers and Alpine for entertainment in cars. Worse, if you wanted to use some of the best Sony products at the time (such as Cyber-Shot digital cameras and Handycam camcoliars), you have to pay memory prices to do so.

The pricing strategy was perhaps the most blatant aspect, because Sony controlled both sides of the equation. The Sony tax that you would pay on Memory Stick products compared to more open standards such as Secure Digital (SD cards) and Compactflash has been incredibly swept. I had several Sony Ericsson smartphones which accepted the storage of memory sticks, and I never upgraded once.

Fortunately, Sony disturbed the owner formats recently, its cameras now using advanced SD card formats and PlayStation controllers fully embracing USB load methods. It seems that the wars of format are finished, for the moment at least.