Though Sony and partners have announced plenty of quality software support for the device in recent months, the PlayStation Portable's hardware hasn't seen much of a change -- at $170, the only real selling point for the new PSP-3000 was a higher-quality LCD screen than its predecessors.
But though that screen displays some of the most lucious strawberries known to man, new PSP-3000 owners are reporting that it doesn't fare quite so well with games. When rendering games like Disgaea, official PlayStation Forum users report, the screen seems to display interlacing artifacts.
See videos of the issue after the break... as well as Sony's official statement on the matter.
In this first video, we can see that the issue doesn't just affect games; you can see the interlacing artifacts just by flicking through the system's XMB:
But when dealing with games in motion, the issue is noticeably more irksome:
What's going on here? Well, it seems that for the PSP-3000, Sony decided on an LCD screen where the pixels are arranged quite differently:
Pictures at CNGBA.com seem to further indicate that the visible lines may not actually be a new issue with the device; they were simply vertical, and less noticeable, in earlier revisions. Only now that they are displayed horizontally along the length of the PSP's clear, colorful screen do they pose an issue.
This is more or less exactly what Sony claims in their official statement (via PSP Fanboy):
On some occasions, scan lines may appear on scenes where brightness changes drastically, due to the hardware features of the new LCD device on PSP-3000. Installed with this new LCD device, PSP-3000 offers more natural and vibrant colors on its screen, but the scan lines have come out to be more visible as a result of improving response time to alleviate the afterimages on PSP-3000. Since this is due to hardware specification, there are no plans for a system software update concerning this issue.
But the fact remains that this will be an issue for many. If you're a first-time PSP buyer, the PSP-3000 may still be the way to go -- but if you're upgrading from a PSP-2000, you may want to think twice before springing for the new model.
Leave a Reply