As soon as I hooked the cable up I noticed the visual upgrade immediately. The XBox 360 dashboard seemed crisper and clearer and the text looked less blurry (this was something I could see with my own eyes, it didn't take looking at some 200% zoom side-by-side comparison photos on some gaming message board to see the difference). The first thing I did to test out the true abilities of this cable was to pop in a slightly-compressed anime DVD that I own. The DVD that showed some obvious artifacts over the previous component cable were nowhere to be found with the VGA cable. The image quality was very smooth. Even the 10th Anniversary edition of Reservoir Dogs (not even the latest version/film transfer) looked noticeably better and could almost be comparable to some hi-def content.
The reason for the obvious visual upgrade on the DVD is because of the XBox 360's hidden DVD upconversion that can only be unlocked through the VGA cable (a true gem of a feature!). As far as games go, they already looked amazing with the component cable, but I did notice that they looked a little more defined and brighter. The games did NOT looked washed out like some reviews suggest. I believe that the washed out picture may have been a problem in the past, but Microsoft has since released a fix to the problem over XBox live (if your system is hooked up to the internet, you will get the upgrade for free...no need for a gold account). Most users probably never had the problem at all.
The VGA cable still includes a digital audio output, much like the original component cable did, and a headphone-sized adapter plug for the audio cables if your television set only has the single input. Just for the information, VGA is also known as D-Sub, so if your television has a D-Sub video/audio input (like mine did), it will work with this cable. Setup was fairly simple, but not exactly as simple as "plug-and-play". You'll need to know your TVs screen resolution (example: my 27" HDTV was 1366 x 768); a simple google search answered this for me. I also needed to manually change the ratio to Widescreen. Both of these setting are changed through the XBox 360's own display settings (not your television).
Obviously, if you have the XBox 360 Elite (black version), you should be using the HDMI cable for the best quality, but for the rest of us with the Premium and Core systems (white versions), the VGA is mandatory to reach the best picture quality on a HDTV. I paid about half the price that this cable retails (bought it off a user on the Amazon marketplace), but after my experience with this cable I would have gladly paid full price for a new cable!
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Customer reviews
This cord provides excellent quality at or above 720. Great Price. It is worth the money over the Intec one. Doesn't Ghost.
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