PSP as a picture viewer

[Aylmer]

I finally got the right USB cable today, and, as per instructions in the manual, set up a PHOTO directory on the Memory Stick in the PSP.

My XP box saw the PSP right away, as soon as I selected USB from the PSP System menu.

I drug a sample jpeg image from my drive to the Memory Stick, then I went into the Photo viewer area in the PSP.

I was surprised. Despite the admonition from Sony that "files altered on a PC may not work on the PSP" the PSP photo viewer saw it right away, and it was a larger jpeg, about 200k.

But what really got me was the way the PSP displayed the pic. It looked beautiful. You can hold the square button, and use the analog button to zoom in and out and it's incredibly smooth.

Evidently, the PSP has some nice built in antialiasing, because no matter how much you zoom in, the image never pixelates, it just gets blurry.

[theWacoKid]

It has a slideshow feature as well. Too bad you can't listen to an mp3 file with the slideshow.

[Aylmer]

...but it may be that there is software you will have to buy to do that. Since Sony is touting their new handheld as a multimedia machine, it is a possibility. With the Palm OS, there are third party apps that will do that also.

Speaking of Palm, the PSP runs circles around my Tungsten T5 in terms of display quality and built in picture manipulation, and it costs $150 less. In fact, the Palm machines output 16bit color with no antialiasing, while the PSP does 24bit color with excellent antialiasing.

[theWacoKid]

Hopefully we'll get a firmware update via the web for added functionality. The best single feature of the psp is the size of the screen. I've seen a number of devices with built-in hard drives but the screens all suck. Small and low res, what's the point? Especially when they're fairly pricey. If the psp didn't sport a decent sized screen, I wouldn't have bothered. As it is, I keep wanting it to be a tad larger, let's say 5.0" widescreen diagnol with progressive scan. Maybe the psp2.