Chapter 9. Viewing Images on the PSP

Now that the world of photography has gone digital (for all but the staunchest analog snobs, who insist that even a 100-megapixel image will never match 35mm film), we take pictures all willy-nillylike. We're no longer on the tight collar of the roll of film threaded through the camera; now we're limited only by the amount of memory we can carry. And memory's small and getting cheaper; a decent camera can hold hundreds of images in a mere 512 MB of flash memory.

In the olden days, we had to take pictures on film, get them developed, and then carry around bulky envelopes of physical photographs to show them to our acquaintances. That would hardly work today, when we likely take two or three times more pictures than we did when we paid for virtually every shot (both in the cost of film and developing). We'd have stacks upon stacks of glossy photos. We'd need rolling luggage just to carry them all.

Today, all that you need to carry hundredsif not thousandsof photos in one itty-bitty pocket is your PSP. You can cram as many images onto your PSP as its Memory Stick Duo can storewhich, of course, depends on the amount of memory on the stick and the resolution of the photographs.

If your PSP's firmware is at least up to version 2.0, your PSP can read all kinds of image files. If it's currently in the 1.x phase (homebrew friendly but feature limited), you're stuck with the image format that most of the world uses anyway: JPEG.

The PSP has a sexy, crisp, high-resolution screen, so you can be proud to show off your various snapshots of your parents, your kids, your grandkids, your cat, your iguana, the supermodel whose pics you stole from the Web and use to try to convince your friends that she's your Canadian girlfriend, and so on.