The problem with that one is that it doesn't do any scan format conversion. Most monitors won't display 480i so you won't be able to view the XBox dashboard or GC games that aren't progressive. The upside is that you will be getting native progressive for games that support it.

If you want a good TV->VGA box take a look at this: http://www.viewsonic.com/products/video_box_vb50hrtv.htm

I believe it's only abotu $100 and it has been getting rave reviews on the A/V boards. It actually has a quality deinterlacer and scaler built in. It's not just a crappy upscan converter.

-Dylan

The problem with that one is that it doesn't do any scan format conversion. Most monitors won't display 480i so you won't be able to view the XBox dashboard or GC games that aren't progressive. The upside is that you will be getting native progressive for games that support it.

I know, but it's much more affordable then the $800 Component input board for the computer. It could do all the scaling and changes to display it, but component to VGA isn't worth that much to me.

If you want a good TV->VGA box

I already have an ATI Radeon AIW card to do this, and the quality still dosen't match my Dreamcast with actual 640x480 output. It is slightly better then a normal 27 inch TV, but not by much.

$250 seems worth it to me since it's only $50 more then the Audio Visionaries box, and will switch automaticially. (Thus eliminating the need for a cheep VGA switcher, or doing a cable swap every gaming session.) Plus, it will still serve a purpose down the road, where as buying a Gamecube or XBox VGA solution will limit me to using them with those devices only, and not other component capable devices.

I play games on my front projector which is VGA only. I own an older version of that Key Digital transcoder as well as the Holo3DGraph PCI board (the only $800 component input board I know of).

There is no doubt that that the best image quality comes from the native 480p through the transcoder. But for a while I was using a $40 vid cap card with an s-video input and deinterlacing software from www.dscaler.org . The quality of that config was surprisingly good. It was certainly far better than standard TV. The key is the quality of the deinterlacing. I don't know much about the AIW but I do know that dscaler is the absolute king of software deinterlacing. I don't believe it works with the AIW cards, though.

The point is most people would be happy with the image and it only costs $40 for the hardware to run in the PC or the Viewsonic will give comparable results for $100-150.

The Key Digital transcoder I have is, frankly, not well designed. It doesn't strip the embedded sync to create a correct RGBHV signal. Fortunately, my projector lets me force sync on green so it works for me. Many computer monitors will not do this and end up with a washed out image. Looking at the specs of the X-Blaster, it appears that they've done it correctly this time but I would confirm this or have the option to return.

Another option, If you know a bit of electronics you could buy the bare board from www.xboxvga.com and solder on your own component input jacks. No VGA passthrough and I'm not sure if it supports resolutions greater than 480p but you can't beat the price.

-Dylan