Will Xbox 360 have an HDMI output? Is HDMI even possible on the Xbox 360? Pieces of the puzzle are fitting together. Over a year ago, Trusted Reviews saw an Xbox 360 at the IDF (Intel Developers Forum) connected to an HDTV and a Microsoft rep let slip that the Xbox 360 could also output over HDMI if there were only a cable available.
Back to the present day, the Xbox Evolved crew noticed a post from Beyond 3Dpointing out in great detail how it’s technically feasible for the Xbox 360 to output digital signals, and at the same time Xbox Evolved noticed a $99.99 Game Stop Universal Premium HDMI cable with Xbox 360 branding on its product page, a pre-release that will ship on 12/1/06.
Microsoft has never said that an HDMI Cable isn’t a possibility in fact they said they had been looking in to releaseing a HDMI cable for the 360 for a while now, but so far demand wasn’t large enough to warrant such a move. The fact is most people don’t know what HDMI is and those that do don’t really need it because until 2010-2012 we aren’t gonna see the Restraint Token on any HD-DVD’s or Bluray anyway so it’s not really necessary any time soon. And visual differences so far are negligible to component at best.
But the question is with the HDDVD Addon coming to the 360 very soon (read: Christmas) perhaps this is a time for them to release the HDMI pack, Only time will really tell, personally i don’t want it so i could care less :)
Source: XboxEvolved360
PS: Someone kinda cussed about this. At 99.99$ plus say 200$ for the hddvd drive, etc, yes this all would put the 360 at more cost than the ps3, but the difference is choice. Personally i don’t want a console with wireless, nor do i want it to have hdmi, and right now i don’t want hddvd either or bluray, the fact is its a media war and within a year or 2 one or the other will be a technology brick. I’d rather wait it out and play killer games. So rather than pay 200$ extra for a ps3 that requires me to lock into bluray, i’d rather buy the cheaper 360, and wait the media war out, if down the road i decide i want hdmi i can always upgrade to hdmi (notice: the ps3 has already said their AV Jack will NOT support hdmi cables ever in the future their is no upgrade path for that). So it comes down to choice in the end, are you ready to be locked into Bluray? Do you really think you should be forced to purchase a more expensive system just because it has a bluray drive that you might not even want/need? I don’t, hence the 360.
Edit: Someone mentioned also that bluray is needed for their almighty ps3 to have awesome big games, because of the 22gig Resistence Fall of Man announcement last week. Let me clear this up hear and now, the game Resistence, is a standard First person shooter, watch the gameplay video’s its nothing special. What then is taking up that 22gigs? From what we’ve heard so far its mostly localization, instead of packaging a Chinese, US, Korean etc versions they put them all on a Bluray disc that will show the consumer the proper version depending on the version of their PS3. This is great from a manufacturing standpoint but from a gamers perspective this means 0, the game is still just a standard regular game with in my opinion subpar textures and poor ai (once again check the gameplay videos). Theirs a reason most games fit on dvd’s and we haven’t seen a 2 dvd game in well… a long time, because more space isn’t really “required” now, streaming decompression and better compression methods allow for most games to still come well under the ~9gb of a dvd9. On a different note, with all that wonderful space on the bluray, how exactly do you think it’s going to fair on the 2x bluray reading at 9mB/sec… even the almost double transfer rate on the dvd12x that the 360 uses takes a while to load levels etc… and thats from games under 3 gigs, god forbid a 25gig game it would take 90-120 minutes just to read the data off the disc without any seeking even. - End Rant :)
