playstation 1 slim lcd screen made in china

The LCD Screen (for PS one) is currently the only officially licensed monitor for the PS one that"s available on the retail market. There have been a few third-party manufactured PS one LCD screens that have seen their way onto retail store shelves thanks to companies such as Interact, Mad Catz and Electro Source, but until just recently we hadn"t seen one that came with the Sony seal of approval.

Does this really mean anything? Based on what we"ve seen of all the products, not really. The officially licensed moniker means a lot more when you"re dealing with things like memory cards and controllers because there"s a lot more reverse engineering going on because unlicensed third parties aren"t obliged to information about the console and how it works. But, in the case of an LCD screen for the PS one, it"s just a monitor that must work with the system"s output and be attachable to it. Not all that hard to do with or without Sony"s licensing.

At any rate, the Sony name generally stands for quality (let"s forget about the skipping PlayStations and the "Disk Read Errors" on the PS2 for a minute) and its official monitor, the LCD Screen (for PS one), is a top notch and well-built peripheral for the console.

When you pick up one of these units, you get yourself one of the LCD Screens, an AC Adaptor (the exact same kind that comes with the PS one unit), and an instruction manual. The screen is a 5" (diagonal width) Thin Film Transistor (TFT) liquid display and to the left and right of it you get 1 1/2 x 1 1/8 in 1.0 watt stereo speakers. Also on the front of the unit and below the screen you have button controls to adjust the brightness of the screen and the volume of the speakers.

The unit fits snuggly onto the PS one with the screws that are on its rear and looks completely stylish when mounted onto the console. It"s also extremely thin and lightweight, which really lends itself to being portable, which is what the screen and the PS one unit are intended to be.

The screen provides excellent video quality with very black blacks, very white whites and excellent color separation and overall picture quality. In fact, thanks to the reduced screen size and general clarity of the picture, most PlayStation games actually look better when being played on this PS one Screen than when played on a regular television set. It"s a lot harder to notice the low resolution of the textures and the general blockiness of polygonal models that are fairly common in most PlayStation games.

And despite the small size of the screen, you won"t experience any problems reading text in most text-heavy games like role-playing games. We were able to test Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy VII, VIII, and IX, Legend of Dragoon, and Vagrant Story and found that the text in each of those games were completely legible. With Vagrant Story, the font"s unique style made it a little less clear than the others, but still didn"t prove to be a problem. The only times that we noticed issues with reading text was during some end-game credits where the text size was much smaller than normal.

If you take a look at the back of the unit you"ll see the DC In 7.5V connector, AV Multi connector (to connect it using a standard PlayStation AV cable to television), an AV IN jack, and a headphone jack.

Sadly, its AV IN jack is one that requires an SCPH-180 U AV connection cable that"s used to connect video equipment such as camcorders to the LCD screen and not standard stereo AV connections like you"ll find in some of the third party products. What this means is that you won"t be able to easily use this as a portable monitor for other consoles like the PlayStation 2, Dreamcast, and Xbox, which is something that is possible with some of the third party units.

Even with the omissions, which include the lack of stereo AV input jacks and Car Adaptor this is a fine PS one peripheral that you really ought to consider picking up for your system if you"re looking to make it a little more portable. The monitor provides excellent picture quality and decent enough sound and looks stylish and extremely cute when attached to the PS one console. It"s currently priced at $129.99, so it"ll cost more than the unit itself, but it"s actually a decent price for a unit of this kind.

First of all, this excludes the LCD combo pack. Didn"t want that and so I haven"t done any research on it. What I"m concerned with is the initially released standalone PSone in a silver box (yellow boxes indicate later models, all of which are made in China).

To begin with, models made in Japan have the A1xxxxxx or A2xxxxxx serial numbers. You can actually tell right on the outside of the box if it"s made in Japan or China (it will say "Made in Japan" or "Made in China"...). Chinese-made models have the A6xxxxxx serial numbers.

Of the Japanese-made consoles there appear to be two runs, indicated by the stickers on the bottom of the console. The first run, spanning serial numbers A14xxxxx to A16xxxxx or possibly A17xxxxx, have a small circular sticker that reads simply "PSone" over the top-middle screw hole. The A17xxxxx or A18xxxxx to A2xxxxxx models have a larger rectangular sticker that says removal will void warranty. I don"t know if there"s any difference aside from the sticker in these two consoles. As far as I can tell they are identical.

A couple other notes... don"t worry if there are some scuffs on the outside box, or if the plastic packaging or tape looks a bit faded. This stuff is about 15 years old now and it won"t look brand new. Furthermore, small factory irregularities (like glue or soldering burn marks) are fine. Same type of box wear you get with any old product. One of the best ways to confirm a system is brand new, aside from it generally looking pristine but for some packaging "scuffs" (I hesitate to even call them this, because the kind of wear you"ll see is so minor), is to check the four circular pads on the bottom of the system. These are dust/dirt magnets, and you"ll be able to tell immediately if the console has had any actual play (they are sort of gray/off-white to begin with, though, unlike the NA and PAL pads, so don"t worry if they look different from the system color).