A fair number of people were pretty excited about the redesigned PSP-3000, sporting a fancy new screen and built-in microphone, but feelings have begun to turn sour. Almost immediately after the updated handheld was released, the Sony forums were flooded with complaints that annoying scan lines were showing up, making the games look uglier than their PSP-2000 counterparts. Here’s a forum post that nicely summarizes the issue:

"Yes the colour gamut is wider, yes the black levels are lower, but this screen now has what looks like scan lines that were not visible on PSPs before. I am not happy about my ’upgrade’."

So, what’s the cause of this? According to Sony, it’s a hardware issue and can’t be fixed with a simple patch or firmware update. Furthermore, due to the nature of the problem, Sony isn’t planning on fixing it. Here’s their full response:

"On some occasions, scan lines may appear on scenes where brightness changes drastically, due to the hardware features of the new LCD device on PSP 3000. Installed with this new LCD device, PSP 3000 offers more natural and vibrant colours on its screen, but the scan lines have come out to be more visible as a result of improving response time to alleviate the afterimages on PSP 3000. Since this is due to hardware specification, there are no plans for a system software update concerning this issue."

So, from the sounds of things, if you’re in the market for a PSP you should likely just go ahead and find an older 2000 model instead of springing for the shiny new one. I haven’t seen the issue in action myself (I’ve got the older 2000 model, so no need to buy another PSP), but my guess is that unless you’re a real video connesseiur, you might not even notice the issue. Of course, now that you’ve heard about it, even if you’ve never seen them before all you’ll be doing now is staring at scan lines every time you pop in a game. Either way, it’s annoying that Sony isn’t planning to do anything about the issue, and would rather alienate some PSP owners than pony up for a fix. I guess they’re hoping this just happens to be a vocal minority experiencing problems, and that the folks who are upset will just quietly go away instead of oh, I don’t know, telling their friends to buy a DS instead of a PSP.