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Darksidehearts · 06/09/2011 10:54 PM

- I have to post this little disclaimer in case I upset someone

*Now take everything I am about to say with a grain of salt, some things are just from my point of view from using the unit and it's features. Some is from internet chatter I have witnessed over the years. Don't take anything I said for solid facts as I may and probably am wrong on stuff. I do apologize if I have misrepresented anything as fact.*

Well it does look like a lot of nice bells and whistles but I hope they have some bite to them. Let's be honest here, the multimedia features on the original PSP units were often criticized by many users and reviewers of being not up-to-par.

Personally I always thought they were a good start if improved upon. Sadly in the case of the PSP the features never received any of the significant upgrades that would push the system to a further boundary beyond what it was.

A video player that was somewhat tricky to encode for at the time seeing as basic MP4 wasn't the most best quality nor did the size parameters always work. It was somewhat improved with AVC encoding and then later with larger display size acceptance for encoding. The most common complaint being that it could have been made to accept more of the common codecs such as AVI, WMV or MPEG.

A music player that performed as much as expected. A few features were added that made it a little more fun to use but other than that no major updates. A few folder options were included later but organizational functions were still not perfect. The player could had been adapted to play other media formats.

The default web browser wasn't really that terrible but was in many ways limited in functionality, later improved upon by both PSPKVM and the Netfront browser. Netfront being the latter to prove how well the PSP's browser could have been. Many people were happy when Flash was added to the PSP but were left unsatisfied with it never being updated. In some ways it would had been better if they left it out.

The Chottoshot Camera was a very good multimedia entry, however it was never really appreciated until much later due to the lack of US and UK advertisement. The UK recieved the newly titled Go! Cam along with some newer camera suite software called the Go! Messenger wich featured visual and audio chatting along with a full mail system. Sadly this service was never extended to the US side and was shut down due to lack of interest.

The quality of the camera being 1.3 Megapixels was questionable however I felt it was very good at the time. The hinge allows the camera to be used to point at a subject or yourself along with different angles. A feature that came in handy for getting those family photos of you and those 20-some cousins that insist on getting in on only one photo.

The functions and features of the camera were very nice as well, manual adjustments of brightness and white balance allow the user to gain a better photograph and make up for the low pixel count. The camera excels more in daytime picture-taking than it does at night as all photo's come out too dark without the right amount of light. With a mod and an small LED the camera even has a night-shot effect.

The camera is not ideal for taking pictures of reciepts or anything small-detailed unless the text were reasonably sized. The different picture size settings and zoom functions were somewhat limited but still worked well depending on the situation.

One of the best features of the camera is the abiltiy to take video with the memorystick as the only depenancy so in other words, the bigger the memory-stick size the more video you can take. One small issue was that sometimes there would be an audio desync on some PSP units with the official firmware.

Installation of the camera was very easy as it just popped into the USB slot but sometimes like with the old Genesis cartridges you needed to blow on the port to clear out any little lint in order to make the connector work.

The portable size of the camera and the small carrying case was often something that was easy to loose but still was very convient to utilize in any pocket or bag.

In my opinion the core features both in the hardware and software on the PSP were a good start and could had been better if some improvements were made. I just hope that the Vita will be more than a machine with fancy features.

Threaded Mode \| Linear Mode PS Vita Multimedia - Web Browser, Video Player, Music Player, Photo Viewer
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