In praise of HDMI

So the XBox HDMI cable that I was bitching about arrived on Monday (praise has to go to Amazon third-party trader "Gadgetsville" for fantastic service) and to be honest I wasn't expecting much. As an A/V fan, I've got a fair bit of history of messing about with different cables and different output formats. Mostly, the differences are fairly subtle - certainly back in the standard definition world. So, while I thought that outputting from the XBox via HDMI might have some benefits for video playback and for upscaling standard DVDs in particular, I honestly didn't expect to notice much difference when gaming.

I tried out Fallout 3 and WOW! The game looks great through component output, but plug in an HDMI cable and the difference is veeeeery impressive. The amount of contrast is instantly noticeable. It seems to increase the range of brights and darks substantially. This increases the depth and three dimensional effect massively.

Have yet to watch a DVD through the new cable. First off, I'm hoping it sends aspect ratio info through to the tv as having to manually adjust when we watch The Wire is a bit of a pain. But I'll be interested to see the difference it makes to standard definition tv. Also makes me look forward to having Sky HD installed a whole lot more (come on Sky, hurry up!).

Has meant that I've added yet another thing to my list of necessary buys. Not only do I need a VGA switch for the office, but I now need an HDMI switch for the main tv.