Need for Speed Carbon VGA comparison
King Kong HD DVD VGA comparison
Xbox 360 games now look better than ever in VGA
Although the new Windows Live Messenger integration and
improved Achievements system are the more widely advertised new features of the
Spring Update, a little known new feature has crept its way into the latest
Dashboard version – improved image quality when using the Xbox 360 VGA output.
A long-standing complaint of the VGA output on the Xbox 360
is its “washed out” picture quality, where colors on the screen would not
appear as bright and vibrant as compared to running the console to the TV using
component cables.
The culprit for this problem is the difference between how
HDTV and PC displays interpret black levels. A correctly calibrated HDTV
typically expects a black level to be at 7.5 IRE (with anything below that to be
“blacker than black”), while a PC display has its black set to zero. The Xbox
360, which is tweaked for televisions, has its IRE tuned for the HDTV norm of
7.5 IRE.
However, due to the fact that most HDTVs manufacturers
expect that VGA inputs are for use with PCs rather than the Xbox 360, most televisions
have its IRE for VGA at zero to accommodate a PC video card’s output. The
result of this is that while the Xbox 360 is sending out a 7.5 IRE for calling
for black, the HDTV is interpreting that as a call for something less than
black, like a pleasant shade of grey.
The Spring Update adds a new feature allowing users to tweak
the IRE setting that the Xbox 360 sends out to the television. “Both Xbox 360
Elite and current Xbox 360 units will have a spring (console) update which adds
support for different video levels for VGA output (“7.5 IRE vs 0”) ... using
this setting you should be able to use computer monitors in addition to TVs
with resolutions all the way up to 1080p with high fidelity and no issues with
HDCP handshaking,” explained
Amir Majidimehr, VP of Microsoft’s Consumer Media Technology Group. “So for
current users, I highly recommend trying this update with your VGA connection
to see if it does the job for you. Note that this is a console update and will
work for both games and of course, HD DVD.”
Surprisingly, instead of giving the user direct control of
the IRE setting, the Spring Update added three non-descriptive options to the
Xbox 360 display settings – standard, intermediate and expanded – with no
indication of which setting represents what level of blackness. DailyTech decided to put each of the
three levels to the test. Presented in the images to the right is a comparison
of each of the three reference levels using Need
for Speed Carbon as the test game and King
Kong as the test HD DVD. “Standard” appears to retain the same black level
setting (7.5 IRE) as it was before the update, and the “expanded” setting looks
to present the blackest blacks (0 IRE), with the “intermediate” setting being
somewhere in between.
While the increased richness and color in Need for Speed Carbon is noticeable, the
more appreciable difference of the new IRE settings comes when watching movies.
In all parts of King Kong, but
especially the dark scenes where accurate black levels are essential, the new “expanded”
reference level produced images that were far richer and less washed out,
providing a significantly improved picture.
"A politician stumbles over himself... Then they pick it out. They edit it. He runs the clip, and then he makes a funny face, and the whole audience has a Pavlovian response." -- Joe Scarborough on John Stewart over Jim Cramer
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