Does the PSP hook up to portable screens?

[schuerm26]

Didn't really know how to put it in the title.

Is the PSP capable of hooking into a car monitor?

I am thinking about getting to screens that attach to the back of the drivers seat and the passenger seat so my kids have something to watch on trips. I know they have the portable DVD players that could hook into those monitors but does the psp have some sort of cable that can hook it up to them? I would rather have a gaming system and just use psp movies then buy just a portable dvd player.

My attempt at describing things might not be clear, but hopefully someone can help. If you can't tell what Im talking about, post, and ill attempt to make it clearer.

[Strell]

If you google "PSP on TV," you'll run across a few products that can help you do this.

The problem is that they essentially are a system of mirrors that reflect the image inside a box you places on the PSP's face, and then outputs it via regular A/V cables to an external source.

So it works, but the quality is going to be pretty shitty.

Doesn't help that UMDs have a pretty crappy resolution to begin with anyway.

So it's possible, it's just not going to be very pretty. I can't seem to find anything that is a straight cable-out option. It seems like the PSP was originally planned to have such a feature, but it got nixed toward the end.

[killthebunnies]

Yup, your options are either a camera based soluition with pretty poor quality, or a hardware mod like the PSP2TV, which involves swapping out the faceplate and varoius internals. I've heard that gives you perfect quality but its a pretty major mod.

[epobirs]

Not directly. This is one of the huge mistakes Sony made in the PSP's design. The ability to drive a standard TV from an iPod Video has proven to be a huge asset for that platform and the online sale of content.

While pricing would still have been a major sticking point, UMD movies would have been far more attractive if one could easily display them on a TV. This did not need to be a stand feature of the PSP. It could have been left as an accessory for those who cared, if only Sony had included the critical functionality such an accessory would need.

Technically, this could be done via the USB port. There are a number of products that let you drive an additional monitor from a PC over USB 2.0 connections. It isn't suitable for PC gaming but driving an NTSC display is well within the performance limits. This would need firmware support and would drain the PSP battery rapidly without an external power supply. (Likewise, this would add a lot of CPU overhead, so it wouldn't be suitable for gaming on the PSP either.) Even so, the existence of these devices demonstrates Sony's lack of imagination.