PSP Camera

The PlayStation Portable Camera has been the subject of a whole lot of attention. The 1.3 megapixel camera's software is for more than just grabbing photos and videos, as a robust photo viewer and also a photo editor are also built-in. Hit a button and you can gaze at all of your photos play in a slide show, complete with a range of special effects (including cloud dissolves and childish borders, if you so choose). Videos also have goofy performance options, as you can have your series of sequences play back in black-and-white or reverse, with a series of assigned or randomly-chosen effects.

Using the PSP Camera was fairly simple. The camera rotates 180 degrees, so you can either face the camera from the PSP screen either back at yourself or at your subject, or you can twist it around and use a more traditional view with the PSP's screen acting as your very-big viewfinder. There is a digital zoom utility to the camera, which isn't ideal in achievement in that it jumps in steps of zoom rather than smoothly zooming through various width levels. Video can apparently be "exported" to AVI for playback on a PC, according to a recent press release, but how video is exchanged and why AVI (when modern PCs can use PSP's MPEG4 formats just fine, assuming this shoots in that format) is a mystery.

The editing application also allows you to make your photos and videos more attractive, assigning some of the effects detailed above as well as adding new abilities. If you desire to put funny glasses and a mustache on a PSP snap of your friend, for example, go right ahead. We weren't able to find Red-Eye reduction in the settings, but it's possible that there may be some easy functions for more necessary photo edits as well. For videos, you can put titles and borders around clips (nothing says "Happy Birthday" like a PSP video of all your friends saying it with a big Happy Birthday sign around them.) There are a total of 72 different modifications you can make to your media with the software, including background music playback. Videos can be captured at full PSP res (480x272) at 30 fps for up to 15 seconds; photos can be snapped at either 480x272 or 640x480. The camera costs 5000 yen, which is close to $50.