One of the new features of the 2000 series of the PSP is that you can now purchase an AV cable which allows you to watch video or view photographs through your TV (or through a projector if it has composite video inputs).

I recently got hold of a cable, it is available through Amazon, but initially I tried at my local Sony centre (well the PSP is a Sony product and it’s an AV cable and the store has lots of big tellies) well no luck there. Nor at Dixons (well dot Curry Digital’ish aren’t they called) in the end I tried Game and found one on the bottom shelf nearly hidden away.

At £12.99 it’s not expensive, but it’s not cheap either, but it does work very well.

Initially I tried the cable with one of those small portable Toshiba LED projectors and though I couldn’t get any audio it worked much better than I thought it was going to.

Then into a classroom with a projector, all our rooms at Gloucestershire College which have Activboards (which is virtualy all of them) as well as a computer also have an amp and speakers allowing you to play audio very easily in the classroom, so quickly connected to the AV cable to the video input and the amp and there was video form the PSP playing through the big screen.

Also tried PowerPoint slides saved as images which worked well, and a Keynote presentation saved as a movie file complete with audio track which worked even better.

One concern I did have was that there was a warning on the packaging that the PSP could only output in NTSC format only and of course here in the UK we use PAL, so when I got home I connected it to my TV, which is an older Sony CRT model and it worked really really well.

Overall I was impressed with the cable and the quality of the output. It certainly is one option for presenting audio and visual content through a projector or a TV and therefore useful not just for teaching staff in presenting learning resources, but also for learners with accessibility issues in accessing PSP content on a small screen.