Aylmer
04-26-2005, 08:12 AM
My wife and I have been thinking about one of those portable, laptop style DVD players for quite a while now. We have shopped around, and there were some features that we wanted, especially a true widescreen display, and the ability to output video to a TV was desireable also.
Well, we both have now watched Spiderman 2 on the PSP (at separate times), and it validated the idea of watching movies on a portable device, and a couple of issues have come up.
The first one is display quality. Compared to portable DVD players, the PSP's display is incredible. You cannot even make out individual pixels, and the video is really bright and crisp. This past weekend we went looking for portable DVD players again, and not one of them had the image quality that the PSP had! The screens were bigger, of course, but in every one of them you could see the individual pixels, and the output was nowhere near as bright as the PSPs, and the colors looked dull in comparison.
The second issue was about PSP movies. In just the last week or so, the first crop of UMD movies has become available. We went to a couple of places to check them out, and got a bad case of sticker shock. They are priced like a full size DVD, and on one, which was a martial arts movie made in Asia (a sequel to Crouching Tigers or something), the price was $40!
IMO that is some serious money to ask for a movie that can only play on a single handheld device. Sony owns the copyright to hundreds of films, and you would think that they would make movies for the PSP a bit more affordable.
But even asking $20 for a UMD movie is way too much, I think.
So, I guess we'll just have to wait.
Well, we both have now watched Spiderman 2 on the PSP (at separate times), and it validated the idea of watching movies on a portable device, and a couple of issues have come up.
The first one is display quality. Compared to portable DVD players, the PSP's display is incredible. You cannot even make out individual pixels, and the video is really bright and crisp. This past weekend we went looking for portable DVD players again, and not one of them had the image quality that the PSP had! The screens were bigger, of course, but in every one of them you could see the individual pixels, and the output was nowhere near as bright as the PSPs, and the colors looked dull in comparison.
The second issue was about PSP movies. In just the last week or so, the first crop of UMD movies has become available. We went to a couple of places to check them out, and got a bad case of sticker shock. They are priced like a full size DVD, and on one, which was a martial arts movie made in Asia (a sequel to Crouching Tigers or something), the price was $40!
IMO that is some serious money to ask for a movie that can only play on a single handheld device. Sony owns the copyright to hundreds of films, and you would think that they would make movies for the PSP a bit more affordable.
But even asking $20 for a UMD movie is way too much, I think.
So, I guess we'll just have to wait.