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.

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.

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.

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!

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.