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:
