The postman called this morning with a very welcome package. The iMP 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable Xbox360/Wii/PS2/PS3 I ordered last week finally arrived. After spending weeks trying to get a similar cable from Play Asia and Devineo I hurriedly plugged everything in.
This cable allows you to hook up 3 consoles to one set of component connections on a tv or monitor. I’m using it with my Xbox 360 and PS3.
The first thing I noticed about this is that there’s no switch to select which console to display. I didn’t try turning on both machines at the same time. Maybe later.
When I had everything hooked up I fired up the PS3 and changed the display settings to component cable, upped the resolution to 720p and confirmed the change. The Playstation 3 home screen displayed perfectly. All the text looked fine, the background swishing thing was ok. I fired up Bad Company 2 and in-game graphics were crisp and looked great!
I tried the Xbox 360 next and Bad Company 2 again. In game graphics were good, not quite as good as with the dedicated component cable from Microsoft but close.
Now for the downsides:
- On the PS3 there’s no such thing as a black screen. I noticed thick horizontal flickring lines. They were barely visible but they were there. Text in-game was oddly sharpened too much, but not enough to be annoying.
- The Xbox 360 dashboard displays an odd shadow behind all text. It makes it hard to read stuff but I’ll get over it as the game graphics looked perfectly fine.
Would I recommend the iMP 4 in 1 component cable? It’s cheap and cheerful and as long as you understand that it won’t be quite anywhere near as good as dedicated cables you’ll be happy with it. I would say the PS3 display was slightly better overall than the Xbox 360.
Final score: 3/5 1/5
Update! After playing for a few hours tonight on the PS3, I’m really not happy with it. The picture quality is too bad, that horizontal interference is too annoying. The monitor I have is a Dell 2405, an old 24″ monitor. It doesn’t support HDCP apparently so I won’t be able to play Bluray movies on it but thankfully games don’t enforce that, I think.
So, I need to spend more money and go searching again. I’m going to buy a DVI-D to HDMI connector and a HDMI cable to go along with it. Maplins have such a beast so I’m going to ring up my local store in the morning to check availability. I could probably get one cheaper elsewhere online but at this stage I’m sick of dealing with online retailers. Fingers crossed they have it.
Update 2! So, it’s interference from my surround sound headphones that’s causing most of the problem. I can either have great sound and crap picture or good picture and ordinary sound. Here’s what the interference looks like on the Playstation 3. Something similar happens on the Xbox 360:
After doing some more reading it appears that PS3 to HDMI to DVI-D doesn’t work because of the lack of HDCP support. I’m going to try putting the Xbox through there instead, and leave the PS3 on the component cable.
I figured out what the problem or part of it is. Inadequate shielding on the switcher cable. My office contains 2 laptops, 2 external drives, 4 speakers, a powerline networking connection, wifi router and of course my surround sound headphones.
Unfortunately the interference problem gets much worse when I switch on my headphones. Tin foil anyone? It’s worth a try I guess.
Tin foil doesn’t help. Bah, and nobody I rang has the PS3 component cable, or the Xbox 360 HDMI cable (with the optical audio connector at the back)
Depressing.
I narrowed down the interference to the USB cable used by the headphones for the PS3 mic. Take out that and almost all the interference goes away. Unfortunately a mic is essential.
Bit the bullet and bought the following instead:
Official MS HDMI cable for the Xbox 360 Official Sony component cable for the Playstation 3 Female HDMI to male DVI-D connector
Costs almost €70 including shipping but at this stage I want peace of mind. I rang the local Maplins who wanted €25 for a HDMI to DVI-D connector. It was a few quid on Amazon.co.uk. Ridiculous. Nobody local had the Xbox HDMI cable or the PS3 component cable.
The PS3 component cable and Xbox hdmi cable have both shipped from Germany via Deutsche Post DHL. Who knows how long they’ll take to get here though. Planes are still grounded due to the volcano in Iceland!
And the HDMI/DVI-D connector shipped a few minutes ago!
Hi! I bought this 4 in 1 Multi Component AV Cable and i have some shadow behind all text on my dashboard, is there a way to fix that ?
DiDaz – I don’t think so unfortunately. I gave up on it and just switch component cables now 🙁