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Xbox 360 Video Comparison
GameSpot Hardware writes "GameSpot has compiled a detailed evaluation of what to expect from the upcoming Xbox 360 based on the type of cabling that you are forced to use. The article shows multiple image overlays to show the quality difference created when you take the unit down from its high definition origins." From the article: "In the name of gaming science, we went out and purchased an RF modulator just to see how our 360 looks using the connection. Unsurprisingly, the RF cable offered the worst image quality of all the cable types we tested. Even with our Canon S400, the colors appeared noticeably more faded, akin to a '70s-esque sepia effect. That might look OK if you're taking shots of your friends discoing out to Saturday Night Fever, but it doesn't fly while playing Xbox 360 games."
is that they didn't include DVI.
This alone is enough to make me not buy one.
I hope Sony doesn't make the same mistake with the PS3, although I'm now loathed to give Sony any money since that whole CD Protection rootkit thing.
The quality of the Xbox360's graphics will only be as good as the weakest link. You need a 720p compatible TV, component cables, and a direct connection (no VCR passthroughs). Any less and you aren't getting your money's worth.
I understand how important it is to have vibrant images as part of a great gaming experience, but this review gave me the sensation that if I don't own an HDTV, the resolution task force is going to come to my house with clubs. Not only did I save myself $400 dollars by getting my desposit back, I saved myself the price of a new HDTV that I don't have (and can't afford anyway).
Somehow, I don't feel like I'm losing anything by gaming on PC anymore.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
I don't know why the authors of this article felt it necessary to go out of their way to demonstrate just how sucky a RF connector makes the XBox picture...if you drop that much money on an XBox, and you don't have a television in your house with so much as a composite input, you're officially too stupid to play video games (which is truly stupid indeed).
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Microsoft researched this and found there was no quality difference between component and HDMI. They did you a favor by not offering 150$ cables that were no improvement, but I'm sure you weren't ever buying a 360 anyway.
Gamespot officially tells us what we all knew before.
The better your tv, the better your picture...
Thanks for that gamespot!! I was going to use my black and white 50hz 15 inch'er with rf input until I saw this article!
$150 cables? Wow, someone's been hanging around AV shops too much. You can get much much cheaper (around $10) DVI/HDMI cables that will do just as good a job as long as it's fairly short (2-3 metres at most) and you don't tape it next to the power cable or anything.
While the video carried over the cables isn't error checked or corrected (HDMI audio is error corrected, if anyone cares), it takes a hell of a lot more interference to put noticable faults in a digital signal, than it does analogue.
I also find it hard to believe there was no quality difference, but am willing to accept it wasn't noticable (to most people).
VGA is an analog standard, DVI/HDMI is digital. This does not necessarily mean a quality difference, although substandard VGA cables and D/A converters can make a huge difference.
I am trying to figure out how much M$ is paying slashdot to advertise xbox 360. This is like the 20th xbox article posted in a week. The sad truth is that less than 5% of us will actually own one at launch date. It's all for nothing.
hold on... youre telling me that microsoft [the maker of the xbox360] said that HDMI [the spec that their competitor is using in their ps3] is no better than component connectors? sounds like FUD.
/is/ better than component connections.
you are right that they did you a favor by not including more expensive cabling, AICBW but IIRC HDMI
Not on my shopping list anymore... POS. What the hell is Bill thinking??
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Esobofh - Currently drinking fresh mango juice.
I think the point of the OP was that no dvi = no hooking it up to his LCD monitor. I agree, it would be nice to have the option of DVI....but it is a console made for being played in front of a TV. The audience for a VGA/DVI hookup would be so limited it wouldn't be worth it. Also, if someone was going to sit in front of a monitor at a desk to play a game, they might as well play a PC game to begin with. Half of the appeal of console systems is being able to play them in your livingroom.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
Why are you so focused on what it will do to bad content, instead of good content?
But hey, if you really don't care about graphics then do you watch TV on the cheapest TV you could buy? Or better yet a black and white TV left over from decades gone by? Do you still watch nothing but VHS tapes and listen only to casette tapes?
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
Better-More-Faster
Just like the RF comparison in the article- we want to, and like to, move forward with the quality of the visuals.
Ask a PC gamer to take his resolution down to 640x480, and play games there. It just isn't as nice.
This is the same reason that digital cameras go up in quality (megapixels) every year. We want to see things that look better and better.
Play a standard def game (or movie, or anything else) on a 42" screen...things start to look REALLY bad.
No reason to lie.
Anyhoo - I actually know a lot of people who don't see a reason to upgrade their TV. It works, right? And HD doesn't come around here anyways (least, not yet). They do see a reason to upgrade everything else constantly. Perhaps, this is a push my Redmond to get "news" (I use the term loosly here) agencies to get the word out the 360 does looks great, it's your TV that sucks.
PS.
There are a lot of people who don't know that TVs come in various qualities 'cause they always shop at WalMart, they're not stupid - they're just not geeks and are underinformed (read: ignorant). Remember, WalMart sells Xbox too.
- I voted for Nintendo and against Bush
NEWS FLASH!!!
RF Picture quality sucks!
Component quality sucks less!
Svideo quality sucks even less!
Composite quality is pretty good!
DVI/HDMI quality is the best you can get on a consumer-grade tv!
For $10 I will write an article for your website arguing between TOSLINK and 75Ohm coax for audio, and then finish it with a tie.
IT WILL BE A REVELATION TO EVERYONE.
Oh, it will be an Xbox2 article too, so that it gets posted on Slashdot.
Why do people obsess about DVI? I can't even get certain deinterlacing applications to work right over it, and there is no quality difference at all on a 21" LCD. I'm glad that said 21" LCD has 2 VGA inputs too, otherwise I would have returned it. I'll never buy a monitor that only inputs DVI, and I'll never buy a video card that only outputs DVI. Besides, with all the awful video DRM that's on the way, isn't having an analog option a good thing?
I can say with 100% certainty that yes, HDTV makes movies better. For me anyway, if you dont' care about picture quality at all then I guess it won't, but I don't know anyone for whom this is the case.
It is debatable as to whether higher-resolution actually produces better looking games; there is no game that has been released that even comes close to looking as good as a computer generated movie on DVD.
First of all, the two parts of this sentence, as far as I can tell, have nothing to do with each other. Secondly, that's debatable? Really? So you think some people would argue that the same scene, with the same FPS, the same models, lighting, textures, etc, would look just as good at 640x480 as it would in 1600x1200. I can't imagine anyone arguing that.
On a side note, HDTV resolutions can make good games worse; take Fear and play it on a pretty modest computer and force yourself to use High resolutions (1600x1200), you will either have to turn all of the detail in the game to low (with lighting off and no shadows) or play at a really choppy framerate; I know I love playing games at 15fps.
So you're saying sometimes you need to trade off one graphical aspect for another. Shocking. But that's an extreme case. I've played games plenty of times where I turned down other settings before the resolution. With consoles it's harder to offer a huge number of resolutions than it is on the PC, so they render everything at 720p and then scale it down for some people. So people playing at 480p will get a slightly worse picture than they would if the console hadn't been designed for HDTV. But people with a tv that supports 720p will definitely have a much better picture than if the 360 had been designed for 480p.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
"I'll never buy a video card that only outputs DVI."
You know almost all(like 99.9%) of video cards with DVI ports are DVI-I which includes VGA in the extra pins. I have seen some ancient compaq TNT2s that were DVI-D, but those are were far outside the norm.
DVI-V = no digital signal, just vga rearranged (I've never seen one of these)
DVI-D = only digital, no vga. Generally this is what a monitor's DVI port is
DVI-I = both digital and analog, you can hook this one up to anything(you need an adapter for standard vga) and it's the most common DVI output
HDMI and DVI-D are basically the same thing in a different pinout, however DVI equipment doesn't normally support interlaced modes while HDMI has to. Anyhoo, what "deinterlacing applications" don't work with DVI??
This is the same reason that digital cameras go up in quality (megapixels) every year. We want to see things that look better and better. Yes, true. However, it's amazing how many people have a 4+ megapixel camera that they never use at full resolution since it fills up their memory card and they don't actually care about the difference (or worse, they don't know how to change the resolution, which is usually preset to something less than the maximum. My point (and I do have one) is that we get a lot of stuff foisted on us that is bigger, faster, more megapixels, lemon scented whatever, but is not actually better in a way that regular folks will appreciate. As much as nice graphics helps make a good game great, it doesn't do jack if the game is lousy. In that case I really would rather play a great game at 640x480. The sad truth is that a lot of what is supposedly making the XBox 360 'better' is hyped up graphics stuff, when the thing that will matter in the long run is whether the games are going to be good. If they don't, it's $400 of badly spent money.
I have a high-end theater in my home, with an Infocus 7205 projecting onto a 160" scren (that's over thirteen feet diagonal).
During the installation, I very carefully compared component video quality against DVI video quality using a high-end DVD player. With good component cables and proper calibration, no one in my family (myself included) was able to tell the difference between the two.
My theater is about the most demanding environment you can find, with a very large screen, completely dark room, and a thirty foot cable run from the equipment closet to the projector. My wife is a professional digital photographer, and as a result both of us are very sensitive to image quality. And even while carefully scrutinizing the screen we couldn't tell the slightest difference.
Now, I confess that ended up using DVI over component for the main DVD hookup. But it's purely practical -- my DVD player won't output an upscaled signal over component, and the image is better if the DVD player does the upscaling rather than the projector. (The DVI vs. component test had to be done at 480p for that reason). Also, I have been able to tell the difference when using crappy component cables (but crappy DVI cables are even worse).
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
>> Besides, with all the awful video DRM that's on the way, isn't having an analog option a good thing?
Only if you never want to play/see any DRM-encrypted media.
Anything DRM-encrypted will not be decryptable (therefore viewable) by hardware that doesn't support DRM en/decryption end-to-end. Meaning your analog-only card and monitor.
funny, I'm like 15 minutes from you in Davis. small world.
Sony ha
I'd choose 1024x768 2xAA 2xAF
because resolution while not the be all end all... still make a difference.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
The console doesn't use a comb filter to produce the S-Video (two-wire) output from a composite source (1 wire)--it is going the other way from basically an internal component signal (3 wire) down to 2 wire. When the console synthesizes a composite signal, some information is destroyed, especially in NTSC, that can never be brought back. With S-Video, the luminance (Y) signal is transmitted directly with no modulation, and only the UV (or Cr/Cb--I'm being a little fast and loose here) signals are encoded together into a chroma signal, which is less destructive (e.g., more of the original signal can be reconstructed accurately).
correct me if i'm wrong....but they are offering a vga cable for $40 *wally-world link here*. and since most monitors can support atleast 1024x768 what's the need for the hdtv? i'm just going to get the svga cable and use my 21" monitor and digital projector until i get my hdtv for xmas.
I was running DVI-out to DVI-in, and DScaler wouldn't do anything (I use a tv tuner for s-video and composite input), the screen just stuck. Switched back to VGA-VGA, without even closing the program, and everything was fine. In any case, I wasn't interested in DVI anymore since I got absolutely no benefit from it, and it caused problems.
I haven't tried DVI-out to VGA-in with a converter for lack of a converter, but you have made me wonder what the specs on those ports are. Might be good to watch for if I have to buy a new video card anyway, I've noticed that many of them have 2 DVI ports now.