My VGA lead arrived today. I have no reason to believe that it’s in any way different to the official VGA lead. Of course it cost less than half the price. My impressions are mixed. I bought this lead to use my 360 with my PC LCD monitor because my HDTV is still at Philips for repair.

The first thing I noticed is that the image is a lot darker and softer than before. I imagine this is because my PC monitor is optimised for DVI-D connections rather than the lesser VGA. Still it’s acceptable. If you have a good plain old CRT monitor then it’s bound to look even better. On the downside, not all games seem to support letterboxed widescreen at 1280×1024. Well, PGR3 doesn’t anyway, the rest seem to. In order to play PGR3 without the aspect ratio stretching all over the place you need to run the 360 at 1024×768 instead. I’m assuming this is a bug in PGR3 as PDZ was perfect.

Anyway, as Dire Straits said on Money for Nothing, “I want my HDTV”. Philips, are you listening?