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2007-01-10
Damn Time Warner
Now that I have got my PS2 and Wii, apart from exhausting myself from swinging my arms playing tennis and bowling on Wii, I'm thinking about improving its quality on my 32" LCD TV. This process is a bit demanding; even the connection to TV has lingos like HDMI, component, composite, and SVideo. I did research a little bit on TV quality before buying my current TV, and I knew that I want it to support 1080p, although realistically I got myself only one that supports 1080i. A little research reveals that I want to use component cables, but the only component input on my TV is already connected to the cable box.
My cable subscription is digital through Time Warner. I have a few channels in high definition, but the quality on the rest channels are pretty bad. I thought it is because my TV now is much bigger than before, so the bad quality is just due to scaling. Checking about these cables and inputs makes me wonder, am I really getting the best performance I could from the cable service?
You can tell from the title that I weren't. Turns out the cable box supports 480i, 480p, 720i, 720p, and 1080i. With my TV I should use 1080i (or enable all the video modes for the cable box to choose), but my cable guy didn't bother to set and just left it to default with only 480i enabled. Setting it properly made the picture so freakingly much better. This also means I have been paying 4 months of cable service without really utilizing it! How could that guy be so lazy and not to set it for me? Why did I trust him and not bothered to check?
Anyway, my research reveals that I need to get component cables for PS2 and Wii. Or better yet, get this multi-console cable from Play-Asia, which can connect PS2/3, Wii, and Xbox to the same input at the same time. Since I don't have enough inputs on my TV, I also got this box that takes at most 3 component connections, a very low-cost option. The only down side is that they ship from Hong Kong, so it might takes a while for the cables to get to US.
My cable subscription is digital through Time Warner. I have a few channels in high definition, but the quality on the rest channels are pretty bad. I thought it is because my TV now is much bigger than before, so the bad quality is just due to scaling. Checking about these cables and inputs makes me wonder, am I really getting the best performance I could from the cable service?
You can tell from the title that I weren't. Turns out the cable box supports 480i, 480p, 720i, 720p, and 1080i. With my TV I should use 1080i (or enable all the video modes for the cable box to choose), but my cable guy didn't bother to set and just left it to default with only 480i enabled. Setting it properly made the picture so freakingly much better. This also means I have been paying 4 months of cable service without really utilizing it! How could that guy be so lazy and not to set it for me? Why did I trust him and not bothered to check?
Anyway, my research reveals that I need to get component cables for PS2 and Wii. Or better yet, get this multi-console cable from Play-Asia, which can connect PS2/3, Wii, and Xbox to the same input at the same time. Since I don't have enough inputs on my TV, I also got this box that takes at most 3 component connections, a very low-cost option. The only down side is that they ship from Hong Kong, so it might takes a while for the cables to get to US.
