S
skinnyfat
Guest
Yes I bowed to temptation and bought one for christmas and this is my (un)biased opinion ;D and yes i know its been around for seemingly ages now but here goes anyhow.
As a portable gaming console it currently has no peers, graphics, gameplay, sound are excellent. Ergonomically you can't really improve on it with all the buttons (there are a few) in the right place. But the PSP was pitched as more than just a gaming console and that is where you have to look to see if it lives up to the hype.
It is punted as:
1. A gaming console
2. Web browser
3. Picture viewer
4. Music player
5. Movie/Video player
The gaming side is done and dusted, a success, but elsewhere is where things start to get a little difficult.
I bought the 'Giga Pack' with all the bells and whistles, 1 gig MS, headphones etc and therewith we find my first gripe. The supplied headphones, while stylish and sleek are limited to 90dB which was my first bone of contention. So those went in the bin and in went my Senns' and things improved. The firmware i'm running allows Mp3, AAC, WAV, ALTRAC formats as the major ones of concern so not too worried about format wars there. As for the actual quality of the player I have to say that as a portable there definately are better out there, the iPod comes to mind :
. On the Movie/video front, the proprietory UMD format movies are actually quite good, the picture quality cant really be faulted and stereo audio is acceptable to good. There is software available to convert DVD's to MP4 format for the PSP and while it actually works very well, It takes around 4 hrs from start to finish to complete the conversion and you lose all chapter information.
So on the whole I am very happy with it and seeing as most buyers will/have buy/bought the PSP for gaming alone they will be very happy. For idiots like me who love gadgets, as long as you can live with the inevitable compromises, you should be hapy with the overall package. And now that I have bought one there are rumblings of a PSP2 with a 60GB HDD and 5 MP camera. Typical
As a portable gaming console it currently has no peers, graphics, gameplay, sound are excellent. Ergonomically you can't really improve on it with all the buttons (there are a few) in the right place. But the PSP was pitched as more than just a gaming console and that is where you have to look to see if it lives up to the hype.
It is punted as:
1. A gaming console
2. Web browser
3. Picture viewer
4. Music player
5. Movie/Video player
The gaming side is done and dusted, a success, but elsewhere is where things start to get a little difficult.
I bought the 'Giga Pack' with all the bells and whistles, 1 gig MS, headphones etc and therewith we find my first gripe. The supplied headphones, while stylish and sleek are limited to 90dB which was my first bone of contention. So those went in the bin and in went my Senns' and things improved. The firmware i'm running allows Mp3, AAC, WAV, ALTRAC formats as the major ones of concern so not too worried about format wars there. As for the actual quality of the player I have to say that as a portable there definately are better out there, the iPod comes to mind :
. On the Movie/video front, the proprietory UMD format movies are actually quite good, the picture quality cant really be faulted and stereo audio is acceptable to good. There is software available to convert DVD's to MP4 format for the PSP and while it actually works very well, It takes around 4 hrs from start to finish to complete the conversion and you lose all chapter information.So on the whole I am very happy with it and seeing as most buyers will/have buy/bought the PSP for gaming alone they will be very happy. For idiots like me who love gadgets, as long as you can live with the inevitable compromises, you should be hapy with the overall package. And now that I have bought one there are rumblings of a PSP2 with a 60GB HDD and 5 MP camera. Typical
