Playstation 2 cables comparison - Composite vs component

By Ree (Ree. at, email. dot, nu)
Feel free to contact me for questions

Last updated: Fri Jan 16 19:26:00 CET 2005

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Hardware used: Playstation 2 Satin Silver Ed. SCPH-50004. Original A/V Cable. Noname component (3xRCA) cable (with 2xRCA for audio). Pioneer PDP-435HDE Plasma Display. Sony Cybershot DSC-V1 Digital Camera. A small shitty tripod. A forklift for lifting the cables. (?)

Right. What I'm going to attempt to do here is to compare two types of video connection cables for the Sony Playstation 2. I don't have any fancy equipment for measuring or anything, I'll only tell you the differences I see, and also try to show you by taking photos of the screen using the different cables. I think I'll be able to show the differences pretty well since I'm going to use my Pioneer PDP-435HDE to display the picture from the PS2. The pictures are taken with a Sony Cybershot DSC-V1 on a small crap-tripod with timer for the shutter release. btw: all images are clickable for larger view.

Let's start with looking at my old cable, the bundled composite A/V-connector. It's very basic and simple, but serves it's purpose. As you can see, it consists of the usual PS2-connector in one end and 3xRCA in the other. One for composite video and one for each audio channel. In a close-up shot of the PS2-connector we can see that it only uses 6 pins in total (the metal shield is ground). Two for each RCA-connector. (yes, that's a forklift holding up the connectors for the shot.) In this close-up we see the 3xRCA connectors in regular metal plating. Not that exciting really..

The first impression I got when I unpacked my new component cable was that the gold plated connectors sure looked good. Although I must say I can't really tell whether it's actually real gold or not. The component cable features 3xRCA for component video and 2xRCA for audio, divided into two bundles. The reason is of course to prevent you from mixing up the audio and video connectors. The component cable's PS2-connector uses all 12 pins, although the other end of the cable only has 10 pins. I don't really see the point with that, but hey... This is the nice gold plated connectors I mentioned earlier, they're pretty cheap, but still better than my A/V-cable.

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