A report about PS3 hardware failures on last night’s BBC consumer show ‘Watchdog’ was full of inaccuracies and, perhaps understandably, has not gone down at all well with Sony...

The Watchdog report, fronted by Anne Robinson and Iain Lee, was centred on the PS3’s “yellow light of death” failure, a problem that has afflicted around 12,500 UK gamers so far, they claimed. The pair went on to explain that the PS3 retails for £400 and, if fixed outside of the 12 month warranty period, would cost a further £128 to repair. To which end Watchdog then parked its own ‘PlayStation Repair Action Team’ van outside Sony HQ, fixing 11 PS3s for free – four of which later broke again before the show actually aired.

But that was just the beginning of Watchdog’s problems. First up, the outlandish price – the PS3 hasn’t cost anything like £400 for years, and the 'Slim' is currently selling for £249.99. Next, the 12,500 figure, which was based on Sony’s claimed 0.5% failure rate and the PS3’s 2.5 million UK user base. For starters there’s no evidence that there actually have been 12,500 failures, or that they’re all yellow light-related. Furthermore, as Sony has been quick to point out, a 0.5% failure rate is incredibly low for any piece of sophisticated consumer electronics.

Sony was also criticised because some owners of broken PS3s had lost their saved data. It hardly needs pointing out that it’s entirely up to individuals to back up their own data. But there you go, and such was the spirit of the Watchdog report.

Sensationalist journalism is nothing new, of course – heck knows we’ve indulged on a few occasions. But the BBC report is all the more surprising because the facts are so easy to obtain. You’d expect Iain Lee to know rather better too, since he thinks of himself as a bit of a gamer – writes/podcasts all about ‘em on MSN, in fact. Tut!