Portable Gaming Revolution

In the third part of a comparison series (the first two being between MP3 and portable video players and then between high end smartphones), Dr. Raymond Soneira has gone and spent a considerable amount of time pitting the LCD screens of the PSP and DS Lite against each other.

It is a monstrous article, where he goes into great detail about pretty much every single aspect of the display of each system. In the end though, he boils it down to the fact that they rank almost exactly the same… with the PSP edging out the DS Lite screen by a very small margin. You can check out the full article, if you’re interested, but here are some of the more interesting stats for you:

- DPI (dots per inch): The PSP wins in this category with 130 compared to 110 on the DS Lite. These numbers are both pretty darn impressive just on their own when you consider that an entire 19″ LCD television screen only has 86 DPI (in case you weren’t aware, the PSP screen size is 4.3″ while each of the DS Lite screens are 3.0″).

- Brightness: The DS Lite is the clear victor here with 190 cd/m² while the PSP can only rustle up a level of 115 cd/m² using just battery power and only 148 cd/m² with the adaptor plugged in.

- Tilted Viewing Contract: Basically, this measures how well you can view the screens from both a forward tilt and then from the side… this mostly comes in handy when you’re trying to watch a friend play. The PSP blows the DS Lite out of the water here with a contrast ratio of 420 when viewed from a forward tilt (the DS Lite is exponentially worse here at 96) and then 64 when viewed from the side (the DS Lite came in at 26).

When all the testing was said and done, Dr. Soneira gave the DS Lite an overall grade of “B” while the PSP ranked in at a more respectable “B+”.

A major issue for the PSP is its weakness in color saturation, which was clearly evident in the photos, and in both the UMD and Flash memory movies and videos. It was also hurt in the Ratings by the firmware restriction on the resolution of videos played from Flash memory, which degraded them to a noticeably fuzzy appearance on the (comparatively) large 4.3-inch screen. The DS Lite performed well beyond my initial expectations. All of the official Nintendo content is based on artificially colored cartoon-like images, so I wasn’t sure how well it would handle realistic photographic images with delicate colors and gray scales. It’s clear that Nintendo engineered the DS Lite to do a lot more than its present marketing suggests.