Sony powerless to fix PSP screen problem Sony has admitted that it’s powerless to fix display problems on the PlayStation Portable 3000, which gamers have complained displays strange lines on its screen. PSP_3000_scan_lines_01 Scan lines appear on the PSP 3000's screen (left) but not on the PSP 2000's screen Images courtesy of Gaming Bits “On some occasions, …
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.
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.
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.
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