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What I wanted out of this cable was the best possible picture for the analog 480i signal from the ps2 into into my crusty old tv without the need for an expensive digital converter/upscaler... and I got exactly what I wanted. I was playing Dragonquest 8 over a rusty old muli-console combo composite/s-video cable that dates back to when this old ps2 was plugged into a consumer crt. I was taking the s-video signal, using my TV's deinterlace, and stretching to a slightly wider aspect. It's passable. s-video is better than composite, but I can't overstate how cruddy this old combo cable is. Badly shielded composite and s-video together over a wire no thicker than the power cable of my ps2 and 4 different rusty input connectors. It's a mess. I had the sharpness setting maxed out on my display and it was still muddy with noticeable pop in for objects far from the camera.
The difference with this thicc, well shielded, component cable is night and day compared to that old setup. Colors are bright and crisp. The automatic backlight adjust was actually dimming the image until I shut it off. The image is so sharp that I have to tune down the sharpness settings slighly to soften the interlacing jaggies from the wider aspect stetch. It's almost too crisp. I tested the picture with Dragonquest, and especially when flying with the Godbird Soulstone, it's just beautiful. The distance pop-in I was seeing from the noisy s-video is completely gone and I can see far away terrain slowly fade in the way it's supposed to look. Terrain and town details from above look incredibly detailed, and the tiny godbird shadow is sharp and clear over all color terrain. I was getting interlacing errors with the some of the small detailed objects like grass and fast moving objects like the bushwhacher jumping outside Tryan Gully that I cannot reproduce with the higher quality component signal. I am noticing some interlacing errors like when the ps2 logo pops on screen during the boot sequence. In a fast busy 2d pixel game like Marvel vs Capcom 2, I noticed some deinterlacing errors with some effects like Guile's sonic boom, and mild screen tear in the opening character flyby, but that all comes down to my old TV's deinterlace process.
I tested the picture with Metal Gear Solid 3, Zone of the Enders 2, Soul Reaver 2, and a few others and the polygonal graphics all look amazingly crisp with no noticeable interlace errors. The opening pre-rendered FMV for Soul Reaver 2 looks amazing and the gameplay looks just as good. The fast moving particle effects and polygonal objects in the Kojima games, epecially ZOE just look awesome. I can't see any dithering or interlace artifacts at all. I did some short play tests for those, but it was really Dragonquest 8 that I played the most, and is one of the best reasons to get this cable. Unlike some of the other games I named, it has never gotten an HD port to a newer console or PC, so without an external digital upcaler this Component cable is the best it can look on real hardware... and it looks great.
I am very pleased with this purchase. Even if I did use an external digital conversion, I would be very happy with this cable as an analog source. As it is, with my old 1080p vizio with legacy inputs, I am very happy with the image quality. It's not super cheap, but the image quality is totally worth the cost. I looked into buying used official, monster, and other high quality third party cables from the era, and they aren't really any cheaper. Whether you're playing on a TV with legacy inputs like me, or are looking for a high quality source signal for a digital upscaler, the HD Retrovision PS2/3 cable seems like a great choice.
A reminder that this might not be a good option for your display when playing PS 1 games. Unless you have a display that is compatible with 240p over component, you're gonna be out of luck trying to play most PS1 games on your PS2. PS3's built in digital upscaling is a solid option for ps1 games though, and it probably looks better than it would through the ps2 hardware emulation and analog output which is stuck at 240p. PS3 even has texture smoothing for the 240p graphics in high resolution and an option to stretch the aspect ratio or play in 4:3.
If you just want to push out a high quality analog signal from your PS2 so that your games look as good as they can, I heartily recommend this cable.
