Sony's PS3: Mastering The Display Tether Multi-Step

Some of you who read my early-January display interfaces cover story, its online addendums or its PlayStation 3-focused follow-on, or who perused Paul Rako’s recent editorial, may be thinking that latest-generation digital connections are the bane of the consumer electronics industry. Unfortunately, their analog predecessors aren’t saints, either. Last night’s experience will, I think, suffice as explanation.

The folks at Rambus recently got a PS3 (they developed the console’s XDRAM memory) into my hands for review purposes. I’ll have more to share in the coming days, but for now I’d like to tell you about last night’s setup travails. My Princeton Graphics AF3.0HD 30" widescreen CRT offers no digital inputs, so I connected the PS3 to it over an analog component video connection. When I powered up the PS3, I saw an illegible display of the type I knew well from past experience; the AF3.0HD only accepts 480p, 720p and 1080i over its component video inputs, but the PS3 by default was feeding it 480i.

Some consumer electronics devices solve this problem by enabling the user, via front panel or remote control key press sequence, to iteratively toggle through the various supported video output modes. Unfortunately, the PS3 doesn’t provide such a nicety; you change video modes through the setup screen….but without changing video modes, I couldn’t read the setup screen! Fortunately, I knew of a way to break out of this seeming infinite loop. The ‘green’ wire of the three-cable component video bundle carries luminance information, so you can plug it into a composite video input and view the display, albeit in black and white. This loophole only works, however, if the component video signal feeding the cable is 480i, since the archaic composite video standard knows nothing of progressive-scan, or of high-def.

I unplugged the component video cable from the display, plugged the luminance channel into the composite video input of my DVHS deck, toggled both it and the display to the correct input, and got my PS3 setup screen. At this point, I had to first tell the PS3 that I was using component video cables versus the default, bundled-with-console composite video ones, and then switch the PS3 to 1080i. The DVHS deck-to-display connection went silent, as expected, since the deck was now being fed by an incompatible high-def composite video source. I moved the PS3 cabling back to the display’s component video inputs, toggled the display input setting back to its component video option….and got the same garbled setting as before. Whaa?

At this point, I thought I was dead in the water. I could no longer see the PS3 setup screen via the DVHS deck intermediary, and I couldn’t see it via a direct connection, either. But I threw a Hail Mary pass, yanking power on the PS3, then powering it back on, after re-connecting it to the DVHS deck….and got my setup screen again. The PS3 reported that it was still driving a 480i output, although I’d just configured it for 1080i. Eventually I figured out what happened; the PS3 will revert to its prior display setting if you don’t OK the new setting within 30 seconds. I didn’t see this OK on the composite video connection because the DVHS deck output had already gone blank, and I didn’t see it on the component video connection because I hadn’t switched cabling and toggled the display input fast enough.

Summarizing, the proper sequence of tasks in order to correctly set up a 480p, 720p or 1080i component video connection between a Sony PS3 and a Princeton Graphics AF3.0HD, after first connecting the console to the display over a temporary composite video connection, involves the following steps, all of which must be completed within 30 seconds:

1. Select the desired progressive-scan and/or high-definition PS3 video output mode
2. Swap PS3 cabling from the display’s composite video input to its component video input
3. Toggle the display input setting from composite video to component video, and
4. Grab the game controller, toggle to and select OK

I did it. After three attempts.

Display manufacturers, please support a broad range of video inputs, including 480i, over your component video connections. And video source (game consoles, DVD players, set-top boxes, etc) suppliers, don’t rely solely on the setup screen; please provide some alternative means by which consumers can manually toggle through your device’s video output options.

Thankyouverymuch. Sigh.