It is with a heavy heart that I bring this awful, terrible news: those scanlines and other screen defects discovered in the PSP-3000? Sony totally meant for that to happen.
To borrow a Slashdotism, it’s a feature not a bug.
Sony Japan said this:
PSP-3000 has a new LCD device with vastly improved picture quality, achieving a more natural and vivid picture than older models. By improving LCD response time to reduce ghosting, the horizontal-line phenomenon becomes more visible… Since this is caused by hardware characteristics, there is no plan to fix it with system software update.
Well that’s misleading. If it is, indeed, a hardware issue, it’s not that Sony would have no “plans” to fix it, but that it simply wouldn’t be able to fix it, without tinkering with the hardware and recalling all those “bad” PSPs.
You now have two options: either buck up and deal with it or hunt down an older model.