Taking the device out of the box, the first thing you'll observe is how light the screen is, it really weighs very little at all. Snapping it onto your PS3 is also pretty simple, it comes with two little clips which clamp it onto the side and slot into the base of the screen. When clipped on the screen adds about 1cm to the highest point of your PS3 slim, it adds more in some areas as the slims surface is curved and the screens is not, but really it adds very little height or weight at all.
In relative to a standard, 'fat' PS3, a slim with the Hori LCD clipped on is both smaller, and lighter than the fat console on it's own. The setup of the screen itself was very simple, as I said what holds it in place are these two small clips on the side, and they make it feel very secure on top of your Slim. The device has a short attached input cable (composite HD av cable) which snaps around into the back of your slim, it keeps itself pretty tidy. The screen itself requires it's own power supply (obviously) but it's just a very small 12v dc cable, my screen only came with cable suitable for a Japanese outlet but with these cables being extremely common I was able to find one around the house, and it works just fine with that. If you do import one from Japan, and need another cable, be sure to check that the cable you're going to use's specifications match that of the cable shipped with the screen.
I'm not entirely sure what the cable is on the left, seems unrelated to the device, still this gives you a good idea of how it'll look on your slim.
The screen manages to look great , it's obvious Hori have made a good effort to make the screen match the slim it's clipping onto, the matte finish of the screen is pretty much the same as the console, the buttons are of the same type, and so on. It's an Officially Licensed Sony product and I'd go as far to say as it looks like it's made by Sony themselves. I noticed some of the screens have the Hori Logo on the top of them, mine however has the Official Playstation logo which matches the silver logo on the front of the slim.
Anyway, onto the screens output quality. As I said before the device uses composite HD, and it's only able to output up to 720p, but it does definitely look good. I've played Fallout 3, Fifa 11, Another Century Code R and Battlefield Bad Company 2 on the system so far and they all looked as you'd expect. Initially I had to do a little tweaking with the colour settings to get the games looking as they do on my regular TV. If I have any complaints it would be that the devices colour range seems to be lesser than my regular TV, and gradiented colours are less subtle on the screen. This isn't something I was able to notice during gameplay but on static backgrounds such as that of the Playstation store. Everything else of the screen appears to be of good quality, you can get a great viewing angle off of the thing which I imagine is useful for multiple players.
Here's the device being shown by Kotaku, who do a good job showing you the visual quality you'll get out of the screen.
As you can see, well as you can see if you've played Demon's Souls before, the device plays the game as you'd imagine it would. Of course the quality of the video itself isn't perfect since it's off-cam but it gives you a pretty good idea of what you can expect, and what you can expect is for your games to look as you'd expect.
Something I haven't gotten onto is the sound output. The device packs in stereo speakers, which are of extremely good quality consider it's size. They seem to be able to output at the level of quality as the built in ones of your standard 20-40" tvs, and much better than the speakers built into LED monitors. So that's pretty sweet, on top of that the device has two 3.5mm audio jack ports at the back so that supports all your usual headphones. It's nice that it has two ports, much better than having to share a pair of headphones when you want to output to more than one player.
The device comes with the standard 1 year warranty on electronics. In case you're wondering the device doesn't conceal any of the fans on the PS3, and won't increase the levels of heat generated.
Overall the device does an excellent job of doing what it's supposed to. It makes the PS3 Slim as portable as it's ever realistically going to get. But honestly with it requiring two power supplies (slim and monitor) that's not really all that portable though. It's perfect for moving between wall outlets but I'm not sure how it'd work say, in the car. I can't imagine you'd be able to run this thing off of the car battery, and even if you can with the two cables things may get a little messy. It seems perfect for taking to hotels and whatnot though. I myself am just using it around my householld at the moment, it's perfectly suitable to rest considering it's pretty light weight.
Verdict
An excellent quality product with good visual, and surprisingly good sound output. Increases portability of the PS3 Slim system drastically but perhaps not to ideal levels for some. The device really took me by surprise, far exceeding my expectations for quality across the board.
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