TV out component cable review
PSP Slim TV out component cable review:
One of the reasons I decided to buy a Slim was for this new TV Out feature and after seeing the Japanese TV ads for it it seemed good and the borders not too bad. So anyway I finally got hold of a component cable for my PSP Slim yesterday. I had to order it in from overseas, as Its very hard to find one here in Spain . (If its even out here yet !!) I have yet to see one of them available, just the plain AV cable which you can only use for video and photos etc, Just not games. Which I think is a waste of time. I don’t know why people wouldn’t want to play games as well.
So I connected this to my TV, first I’ve noticed the cable length is not what i thought it was going to be..Its about 2.5 m or less. And that means it doesn’t reach from my TV to the couch!! That’s not good! upon selecting TV-out through the XMB I was happy to see a full screen menu. Not bad I though, looks great. However when loading up Metal Gear Solid Portable, it went from having small borders on the PSP boot slash image to the games massive borders! (See below)
Nice huge borders you got there Snake!
Now I recall the Japanese advert showing smaller borders on the TV out from the PSP Slim, maybe false advertising is legal in Japan? Or that bravo TV was using a zoom function…. My guess is they were using the zoom function on the TV. So in 16:9 output and I’m seeing almost 40-45% of my TV’s screen is lovely black borders. I understood there would be borders, but I never believed it would be almost half the screen. If your lucky you TV can zoom in on the picture. But at the cost of being more pixelated . Thankfully I can zoom, but only vertically arghh…Damn so that’s no good either.
Once playing a while through the TV you begin to forget about the huge borders, of course there must be a reason for this Sony wouldn’t give us such border without reason surely?. CPU power is needed for up scaling and maybe the little unit just can’t do both without a loss in fps. Once you return to the PSP screen its looks so sharp and more detailed.
I’m left with that disappointed feeling from my TV-out PSP experience.
The Good: Having a portable movie player. Finally being able to play PSP games on your TV. Option to use it like a portable MAME box. Those arcade games look good on the TV.
The Bad points: Borders much larger than originally advertised 40-45% of the screen is a border. Cable length is too short.
Rating: 6.5/10 – Give us a slightly higher resolution and a longer cable please Sony 