Buy at your own risk. Any portable console's model, regardless of it's baseline, has the potential to do worse compared to supposedly inferior models. Nothing is guaranteed.

On this page, is a summary of the Esoteric Device Wiki's recommendations of which version of every portable console is best to buy. When determining our decisions, we primarily base it off of functionality and reliability, not price. Price fluctuates, but objective capabilities and reliability mostly doesn't. Each listing for each portable system will supply the name of the best version to get (eg. PSP-2000/3000), which revision within a version to get (if applicable), and the reasoning of choosing the given version/revision. If you'd like to get a detailed summary of all the portable console revisions and versions out there, check out the Console Revisions Overview!

All information is pulled from the Console Revisions Overview, which in turn pulls from the wiki page for each documented portable system. If a portable console is not on this list, it either has no version/revision differences, or it's differences are entirely cosmetic, which is also something our wiki will not decide on, because these cosmetics will be almost entirely subjective.

If you want to specifically know which portable systems have the best hacks, homebrews, and so on, check out the Portable Console Buying Guide for EOPs/Hacks!