OK so I got the unit in today... My first impressions are mixed, but I'll be testing it out more extensively over the weekend.
But first the pictures (because everyone loves pictures)
The Well Packed Box inside a box from shop4tech.com
Looking at the input on the box picture it's pretty obvious who this product is geared towards
The stuff that came in the box (except for the remote which I forgot to take a picture of)
OK
First things first, The build quality of this unit seems to be pretty good, you've got your standard steel case with (what I believe to be) a real aluminum front face. a nice looking LCD screen, and oodles of ports on the back. Pushing and prodding it seems like it's a pretty sturdy device. The Buttons all have good action (they looked cheap in the pictures so seeing and feeling them in person was a pleasant surprise) And all the ports on the back are mounted strong against the steel. The top metal piece flexes a little as it seems it's not bolted anywhere but the sides and back, so when pushed it can move up and down under the front panel (like the freshness bump on the top of a jar). Not a big deal though. The remote is also much nicer in person then they seemed in the pictures, again the buttons are nice and the remote is actually made of aluminum, it's also a little larger then I expected too be (maybe 2"x4.5" and 3/4" thick though I didn't measure). Overall it had a good feel to it.
Bringing the unit down into my basement it was very light weight. Setting it on top of my Marantz receiver it matched it's width exactly as did the color and brushed aluminum pattern. Looking at the back panel it hit me that it used an un-grounded wall wart for power. The first thought that came to mind was that I would have preferred a grounded connection of some sort, particularly for a powered video switch an earth ground would help with reducing interference and noise. Maybe it doesn't need it... The next thing I noticed was the the inputs closest to the power were the optical ports. This I thought this was cool and it made me feel like who ever designed this actually thought about where they were putting things.
There are 5 inputs on the back all of them support Component video, S-Video, Composite Video, Stereo RCA Audio. The first three inputs also support Optical and Coaxial Digital Audio. There is a 6th input on the front panel but it only supports S-Video, Composite Video and Stereo RCA Audio. There are also 3 Ethernet ports on the back but they're set up rather interestingly Basically you'd still use an external switch to connect all of your devices too, but the system selector will allow you to connect them to two different LANs. Not only that you can switch which LAN you're using on the fly via the remote. I don't have any use for that but I thought it was kind of cool none the less. (I suppose you could leave one disconnected and use it for "unplugging" your Xbox from Live if you didn't want to be connected for whatever reason).
Swapping over all the wires from my old selector There was adequate spacing between the jacks, enough that even the large headed monster cables I had fit without squeezing or even rubbing like they did on my old selector. Also there is no shroud around the back which makes things easier as well. All the plugs felt very sturdy and even plugging in the very stiff Xbox 1 cables I use (the official Advanced HD AV Pack V2) the stayed stiff and strong. Actually the Xbox 1 cables are what broke my last switch as I tried to switch some things around and the pressure I had to apply to get the plug onto the jack just pushed the jack into the switch instead of the plug onto the jack
...but that wasn't a problem here.
I also didn't anticipate needing another Optical cable as I have 3 optical devices (Xbox1, PS2, and Xbox 360) and one cable for each, formerly going into my receiver. Now that all 3 are going into the switch I need a 4th to go from the switch to the receiver, no big deal I just didn't think about it.
Turning the unit on the display looked exactly like it does on the box picture. Bright Blue with white text. the manual was pretty clear on how to set the text to the input number. Interesting enough it can only be set by the controls on the unit itself, not by the remote. At first I cursed because that meant I had to get back up off the couch
but then I realized it's a good idea considering that meant no one would accidentally mess with it via remote. Input 1: Xbox, Input 2: PS2, Input 3: Xbox 360, Input 4: GameCube, makes sense to me It even offered 3 different ways to display Playstation: PSX, PSOne, PS1...
Turning off the lights and firing up the projector I realize the remote offered no back-light. not too big of a deal considering each input has it's own unique button on the remote, so aside from Power, LAN1 and LAN2 (the first 3 buttons) you could just keep pushing stuff till the display on the console had what you wanted.
So now for the real test... What does the picture look like?
Well I just sat back with the still image of the dashboard up looking for something to move. In the past interference has shown up in the form of random strings of pixels going slightly off color momentarily here and there like static. I didn't see any of that, The picture looked free of interference completely. Even walking up close to my screen I didn't see any.
... but something seemed not right ...
Looking around trying to figure it out I noticed that a lot of the text on the screen was shadowing, that is to say had a ghosted version of itself duplicated a few pixels to the right. Upon closer inspection everything was shadowing but depending on the colors some were more visible then others. It's most easily distinguishable with text (black text on a mid-tone seemed to be the worst) but even the "A" button icon at the bottom right had a faint ghosted green shadow 3 or 4 pixels to the right. NOT COOL. I fired up GeoWars to see if I could see see the shadowing there (simple shapes on a black background), I figured it would also be beneficial to test for any lag possibly introduced. Surprisingly I didn't notice any shadowing or any lag at all (good, and good). Though the lack of shadowing could be due to the colors being used, as the darker the background the less apparent shadows were.
At this point my GF came home and I asked her if she noticed anything different, she couldn't after staring at it for a bit and I pointed out the shadow. She saw them but said she'd have to go out of her way to notice it.
I went and put the Xbox 360 cables and the output cables back onto the old switch to see if maybe this shadow had been there all along and I had just never noticed it before. Examining the picture through the old switch I did see some shadowing but it didn't seem as apparent. At this point I noticed the colors were slightly different too. I put the connections back onto the new switch and the shadows hit me like a ton of bricks. They were definitely more noticeable with the new switch. I thought maybe it's because the new switch is carrying the signal better and everything has been tuned to the old switch, maybe I have some settings cranked way too high or something. So I went into the projectors menu and started fooling around. If anything it only served to make it worse. I fired up a game of bankshot billiards and the balls all seemed to have little ghosts hanging out to their right.
I had to shut it off before my head exploded.
I'll say this... I'm still going to be optimistic. The cables I'm using from the switch up to the projector are total JUNK (a really crappy 25' VGA to component cable that came with the projector, 3 Radio shack barrel plugs and the component cable that came with the crappy pelican switch), I actually have really nice replacement cables sitting and waiting to go (50' 4x shielded oxygen-free gold strand SVGA cable, and a similar 3ft VGA to component adapter), I ordered them from monoprice a short while ago and just haven't got around to putting them up yet. Also through futzing around with the projector setting the colors and everything are definitely messed up and way out of whack so it could still be my own fault the ghosting is there. Also since I moved to this house I've had that old switch and I haven't compared the new switch to NO SWITCH at all, which would be the best baseline. I also never checked any of the other inputs. Not to mention I wouldn't mind adding an earth ground to the case to see if that helps any.
All of this stuff I plan on tackling this weekend.
In the mean time I've tried to do some research into what causes shadowing like that but I couldn't find anything AT ALL. I know I've seen it before but only when a low res image gets upscaled or just blown up. I see it a lot on composite inputs when going into a projector. (and yes it was still outputting at 720p I checked the signal with the projector).
So if anyone can give me any insight as to what can cause shadowing let me know. In the meantime I'm really luke-warm over this switch, but remaining optimistic.
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Topic: Score System Selector Pro 2.0 (Read 274 times)