Entered CNET Catalog: 11/04/2006
SKU: CNETXPLODERPS2HDTVPLAYER
Manufacturer: Fire International Ltd
Product summary
The good: The Xploder PS2 HDTV Player comes with a decent-quality component cable and does actually produce a high-definition picture.
The bad: The software progressively shrinks and squashes the picture as you increase the HDTV Player's resolution. It also restricts aspect ratios on certain games at certain resolutions. And it needs to be loaded from a disc before every game.
The bottom line: There wasn't a PlayStation 2 high-def solution before the Xploder PS2 HDTV Player came out--and there still isn't one now.
Editors' review
- Editors' Choice: No
- Reviewed on: 11/08/2006
The Xploder PS2 HDTV Players runs on your PS2 by using a startup disc. When you insert the disc, you can toggle between various NTSC, PAL, and VGA resolutions. You can also change the placement of the image. Once you've chosen the resolution you want to use, simply insert the game's disc, then press start. The HDTV Player comes with a component cable, but if you already have one connected to your PS2, it'll work just as well.
The NTSC resolutions available on the HDTV Player are 480p, 720p, and 1080i. In each of our tests, changing to the 720p and 1080i modes did indeed change the system's output to those respective HD resolutions, however the image was stretched and squashed in both cases, creating a Westinghouse LVM-47w1 and found the higher-resolution images to be too small to be appealing to any HDTV owner, even with the ability to move the shrunken image anywhere on the screen. The image is sharper but much smaller and no more detailed.
With the high-def resolutions a wash, we decided to move onto the HDTV player's progressive-scan mode. We first tested the HDTV Player with one of the PS2's more HD-friendly games, Shadow of the Colossus. The game offers progressive-scan and wide-screen modes by default (without the need for the Xploder), so we looked at its "native" 480p and wide-screen images before deactivating them and firing up the Xploder. Alas, it was impossible to use the HDTV Player's 480p resolution with game's wide-screen mode engaged, as it is automatically restricted to a 4:3 aspect ratio. We then tested a game designed for standard resolution, Dirge of Cerebrus: Final Fantasy VII. Unfortunately, there didn't seem to be much of a difference in picture quality, as the edges of door frames in the city streets still exhibited a large amount of aliasing.
Yes, the Xploder PS2 HDTV Player technically delivers increased resolution to the PlayStation 2. But given the negligible upside to the "improved" resolution and the fact that the picture quality is adversely affected in so many other ways, it's impossible to recommend this product to anyone.
