Move Over RRoD, Welcome the Yellow Light of Death

Since the console’s launch, Microsoft has received a lot of flack for the infamous “Red Ring of Death”, named after the red ring that appears around the console’s start button. If you happen to see it, you’re going to be in for some disappointment. My first Xbox 360, which I bought the first second (alright, about 5 minutes after) the console launched, died of the RRoD in December of 2007. I was not pleased.

I’m certainly not alone, as the RRoD failure rate was incredibly high. If you saw a full or half ring, you were usually fine as it’s usually a fixable error. However, if you saw 1/4th or 3/4th of a ring, you might as well waste no time and give Microsoft a call. The big question is… how is it that Sony has escaped such problems with their PlayStation 3? The answer? They haven’t.

As BBC’s Watchdog programme exposes, the PlayStation can fail just as well and the result will be what gamers have called the “Yellow Light of Death”. It refers to the console’s power button, and if yellow, the console will need to be repaired. When Sony was questioned about this, the company stated that they offer repair service, although it’s a little expensive, at ~£128.

Surprisingly, a YLoD doesn’t always mean an unfixable console. In the Watchdog’s tests, all 16 consoles killed by a YLoD were fixed by a local repairman, by heating up the circuit board to re-melt the solder. Sadly, 5 of those 16 died again, so the solution isn’t always an ultimate fix. It also appears that the launch 60GB consoles are of the most affected, which is a little scary since that’s what I own. Even swapped with a new console I’d be a bit concerned, due to reasons I posted about just a few weeks ago.

More than 150 Watchdog viewers have contacted us to say they’ve experienced it, and by Sony’s own admission, around 12,500 of the 2.5 million PlayStations sold in the UK have shut down in this way since March 2007. The problem is mainly thought to affect the 60GB launch model, but Sony repeatedly refuses to release the failure rate for that model, claiming that the information is “commercially sensitive”.