Once again sony screws over its costomers with crap new hardware, i used to realy like sony untill the PS3 came out but with the price of ps3 in the uk and now with the new dodgy psp sony can shove it all.

Usual cobblers about a fault being a feature, who'd have thought Sony people also worked at Microsoft too.

Tut tut Sony, standards are slipping. There may well be recompense for consumers in law, but only to get their money back. Sony should fix the problem and issue new for old consoles to registered purchasers. They won't though.

To fool dumb consumers that don't realise that a still image can't accurately portray what a moving image looks like.

Ever taken a picture of your TV screen? Clearly people are stupid if they believe this crap.

You ARE Mark, and I claim my £5.

And heres me planning to buy a new one... I think i'll stick with what i got... As they say Newer isn't always better.

Scanlines were always a sign of a hi-res arcade screen back in the day.

If the screen is sharper and less flickery it doesn't surprise me that you can now see the lines between the pixels if you look *really* closely at still screens.

Sheesh.

You really are a retard.

What part of

"“scan lines have come out to be more visible as a result of improving response time to alleviate the after images on PSP-3000”. " *Sony said*

didn't you read?

Just like all the electronics companies do now-a-days...they do widescale public beta test called putting it out to market. :P

Many handheld DVD players have awful line-structure which appears to be the result of "row-inversion" LCDs where the common-electrode voltage (a.k.a. Vcom) has not been very well tweaked. Tweak that voltage (internal preset potentiometer or digital preset) and the problem largely goes away.

I haven't seen an affected PSP-3000, but the hypothesis can be tested if you apply a bitmap composed of alternate horizontal lines of black and RGB(180,180,180). If it's a row-inversion display and this pattern flickers like crazy then it confirms poor Vcom setting.

Plenty of desktop LCDs have a similar issue with scrolling cross-hatch patterns (they use different inversion patterns) showing on mid-level colours - I've opened several 17" monitors to tweak out the problem.

Google search for

LCD flicker inversion

should give you some more pointers on this theme.

Sony used to have decent electronics, but seem to have lost their way the last 10-15 years and no idea what to do about it. Everything they turn out now is shite in one way or another (can you say bleuray?).

I've seen better screenshots of this problem and it looks very much like the result you get when you de-interlace an interlaced image and don't do anything to filter it.

With interlaced images you alternate between displaying the odd and even lines of an image with each frame drawn. For the PSP this means it has less work to do when rendering a scene, but it also means when you put a much better screen on the system the artefacts of de-interlacing are apparent.

Cheap ways to combat interlacing are to either blur the image or using line doubling to hide the lack of data from frame to frame. Neither of which creates a very nice image, but on the small PSP screen it could work. Higher end devices like projectors have much better de-interlacing chips which remove all artefacts and still give a sharp image. The only problem is that if you have a flickering sprite it won't flicker properly with this method. Plus it's expensive which is probably why Sony didn't do it.

Long story short, the PSP will always have this problem.

I would love to buy a PSP, but since Sony seems intent on destroying good ideas, good intentions, and their company image with bad designs, I think I will avoid the PSP.

I regret selling my Atari Lynx all those years ago. That device kicked ass!

And I'm perfectly happy with the screen so far. It's not a hideous artifacted mess, nor is it a massive improvement over the launch models. It *is* perfectly serviceable and displays the games nicely, including a variety of 2D and 3D titles.

But by all means let's carry on judging it from screen shots. That's a fine tradition in the world of gaming, after all.

I own Sony Vegas Pro 8.1 and the thing hangs when I import about 40 MP4 clips (about 1GB in total) from my HD camcorder in one go. Sony's advice - import in batches of 10 (which doesn't really solve the problem anyway) or convert all the clips to DV first! I can't believe no one at Sony thought to test this scenario. My PC's a new Intel Core2 Quad 2.83 and 4 GB RAM before anyone says get a faster machine. It is Vista crippled but that's only because I needed Vista for Vegas 64-bit!

No such thing with LCDs. It's a fixed pixel based display with pixel based refresh, not a CRT with electron beam scan lines that draws the display a line at a time!

More than that, LCDs are by their very nature progressive displays. Interlacing that may exist in the game's display would be de-interlaced. Though I can't believe they'd be using interlacing on games intended for a small LCD display.

However, the artefacts shown in those screenshots are more akin to what some observe on projectors, i.e. "chickenwire" effect. Usually a physical limitation.

Sounds more like they've just opted for a cheaper/poor quality LCD display.

As for Sony quality. Used to be a Sony fan, but since around 2000 their quality has dropped sharply in my opinion based on the failures I've had in Sony kit and from what I've read.