UPDATE: Or are they?  See the comments.

I chide Sony a lot, but when the Sony Computer Entertainment president, Ken Kutaragi, boasts that the PlayStation 3 will be able to run games at 120 frames per second, how can I not say something?  This is just the latest in a long history of similar claims about the PS3's general amazingness, but even this is over the top.  For comparison, today's modern video games run somewhere between 30 and 60 frames per second.  There's a reason why console games tend to top out at 60 fps, mainly because standard televisions cannot produce an image above 30 fps and even if they could crank out anything above that, the human eye simply cannot keep up with anything beyond 60 fps.  Sony can boost the frames per second as much as they want, but we simply will not be able to see all of those frames of animation.  That is, unless Sony's next peripheral is some kind of optical replacement unit.

I understand why Kutaragi boasts like this.  Most consumers will never check up on the limitations of human sight or television output.  Tell most people that a game runs at 120 frames per second and they'll look right at the screen for a moment and declare it true because they can "see" the difference.  Sony (and most other companies, for that matter) don't care what they have to say in order to sell units.  If this latest claim sells another batch of PS3s, then Kutaragi has done his job.