Good news on the cable front! The Xbox 360 HDMI cable and Playstation 3 component cable arrived today!
Despite my misgivings after earlier testing I plugged the Xbox cable in first. The cable comes in two parts. A bog standard HDMI cable and a short “audio” cable with digital and phono connections.
Microsoft made it impossible to use the standard component cable with a HDMI cable because the connector on the Xbox side is so huge. This connector is thinner though. Profiteering?
Anyway, I plugged everything in, HDMI cable into the DVI-D converter and switched on. The screen looked dull like last time so I went fiddling with the colour controls. Instead of “Normal Preset sRGB” I jumped down to “user preset” and bumped up each of the green, blue and red channels and everything looked much better! A little more fiddling with the game brightness in Bad Company 2 and it looked perfect!
I even played a short game of Rush on Arica Harbour and kicked ass as an attacker. We lost eventually on the third base but I took Bravo on the second, and Alpha on the third! I think I was the highest scoring player on my team too! 🙂
The Playstation 3 component cables worked as advertised. I booted it up but didn’t play anything and all that distracting interference is gone! Woohoo!
Looks like the colour settings are saved per monitor input. When I switched to component or back to VGA it had bounced back to sRGB. Nice.
The only downside now is that the Xbox plays in 1920×1080 while the PS3 plays in 720p.
Does that mean you are now officially fuzz-o-vision free?
Oh yes! And gone with it are all the excuses for my bad KDR or general gameplay! Oh well, it was worth it while it lasted, I wonder if anyone believed me?
But golly, playing Laguna Presa on standard resolution was a nightmare. I never want to do that again!
Oh my, Little Big Planet is so much more vibrant on this monitor. Just played it there with my son, though he prefers to watch me play it. He’s sort of getting the hang of moving the rag doll left and right! He loves any of the race levels!
Donncha,
I stumbled onto your post here when I was searching the web for info on going HDMI from a 360 to a DVI digital input on a projector ‘without’ HDCP. It sounds like you basically did the same thing with your Dell monitor and it worked, correct? That’s good news and I’ll go ahead and order either an adapter or a cable that does the conversion. Curious if when you play a DVD on your 360 if it still works? Didn’t know if HDCP suddenly engages for that as opposed to gaming.
Glad your setup is working and really appreciate your time,
Chris
Chris – DVD playback doesn’t require HDCP as far as I know so that shouldn’t be an issue. I never tried playing a DVD on the Xbox though. The HDMI to DVI affects the display. It lacks contrast and is slightly dull.
I was able to mostly rectify it by changing the colour temperature and increasing the in-game brightness but it was never quite as good as the component cable I used before.