thirty said:
i heard the games through vga didn't look so great before the recent dashboard upgrade. can someone confirm this info about gaming through vga?
I bought a knock-off VGA cable from ebay for $15 (shipped) canadian from some group in the UK. I figured for that price I could test DVD upscaling and see how my TV handled the connection.
Overall the picture was fine, perhaps slightly washed out but I didn't spend ANY time calibrating the connection so I'm sure I could get it to the same quality as component in terms of picture clarity. My biggest problem is that my TV doesn't handle the resolution or refresh rate of the VGA connection very well. I either get underscan or overscan depending on the resolution I pick and the "zoom" mode my TV lets me select for the input. The best I can get is underscan with about 1/2" black border around the viewable area. I was a bit disappointed with this but proceeded to test DVD upscaling.
Initially I was a bit skeptical as to how much difference it would make but it really is huge, I watched a bit of the Matrix as a test and the upscaled image was significantly better, no hard aliased edges and the dithering on people's faces was a lot less noticable on the VGA upscaled connection.
In the end however I decided to go back to component. I don't actually watch all that many DVDs (and don't plan on buying the HD-DVD drive anytime soon) so I went back to component that let me view the games without any underscan.
If I actually watched DVDs regularly though I probably would have kept the VGA connection because the underscan problems were overshadowed by how much more improved DVDs looked when upscaled.