HDMI vs Component with the Xbox 360

My launch day Xbox 360 recently died again (third RROD), and whilst it’s great that Microsoft will usually repair them for free, it’s the whole inconvenience of sending it away that gets to me, for a start I’m not home all day during the week, I have a job. Secondly it’s just inconvenient not being able to play the games and use the online service i’ve spent my hard earned money on.

I’m a fairly patient person, actually that’s a lie. I hate queuing, waiting and anything else that prevents me from getting to where i want or doing what I want to do. What made this lack of Xbox worse was that my pre-order of Guitar Hero 5 turned up just as the broken Xbox 360 was going back. In fact I had shiny Guitar 5 on one side of me and busted broken Xbox 360 on the other awating collection by UPS.

That day i walked back from work, straight into my local Tesco and bought an Xbox Elite. In my head the justification was that I’d have a larger hard drive etc. The fact that it had HDMI didn’t really register as much of an advantage, except for maybe some tidier cabling.

The Xbox Elite has some obivous advantages straight away, for a start it’s definitely a lot quieter, although i’ve heard some of the newer permium and arcade consoles are also equipped with quieter DVD drives these days. The power brick is actually a little bit smaller, not loads, but it all helps when you live in a 1 bedroom flat.

The biggest advantage however is the picture quality through HDMI. Now, I’ve read quite a few technical comparisons of component and HDMI xbox connections and people have said there’s little difference. This didn’t seem to be the case for me, and from comments I’ve read on various forums people’s opinions seem to differ. I’ve come to the conclusion that the level of improvement might depend on the TV you’re using. I’m using a relatively new mid-range 40in Sony Bravia, the picture quality on component wasn’t bad, but i always detected a slight ghosting, which initialy annoyed me but i got used to it. Through the HDMI connection the picture is incredibly sharp and the colours seem a lot deeper, black is a lot, well..  blacker. Which isn’t bad for an LCD TV.