A couple of weeks ago I was reading through a thread on GAF where someone replaced gaming with their Xbox 360 from the normal TV with gaming on their PC monitor via the VGA cables. The thought the picture looked a lot better even though they had to go to a smaller screen.

Then a few posts down, some other people started talking about how they hooked up their Xbox 360 to the PC input on their TV. And a decent number of people thought the picture was significantly better, even the ones that had some complaints (e.g. too dark, washed out, bad contrast, etc.) thought that in general the picture looked much sharper and more detailed.

Now that got me thinking something I hadn’t even thought about before… I’ve already hooked up my laptop to my TV so I could watch TV shows I downloaded from iTunes, but I had never, ever considered to do the same with my Xbox 360. I always thought that component is the way to go for that. So the next day I went out to get myself a VGA cable to try this out.

After making sure I got the right resolution through the Dashboard menu, I was really impressed with the results. I guess I lucked out because my TV has its VGA settings calibrated fairly well, so the image looked visibly different to me — some of the text in the menus looked sharper, some of the textures looked more detailed, things like that. I suggest that if you can try the VGA cables with your display, definitely try it out because I was totally missing something good because I didn’t think about it.