The agony

Had a small windfall the other day, so we decided to treat ourselves to a PS3 Slim. We've been umming and ahhing for a while over BluRay players, and we know from mates' experience that the PS3 is one of, if not the best player on the market.

What really swung it for us though was a couple of recent examples where our Toppy failed to record some favourite programme or other. Not only does the PS3 come fully wireless enabled, but it also plays BBC iPlayer directly on the telly. The fact that it also "does games" is nothing but an added bonus. We've had this massive plasma screen over four years and never once had a High Definition signal through it, so the prospect of The Dark Knight in HD was positively mouth-watering.

The box itself was delivered yesterday and the rest of the gubbins (HDMI cable, various controllers and a game) arrived today. Even so, I'd intended to wait until tomorrow to set it all up, but certain of the younger members of the family were already visibly drooling so I cast caution to the wind and set about cabling it up after dinner. I should have listened to my inner paraskevidekatriaphobe. Friday the 13th is no day to be getting complicated electronical paraphernalia hooked up.

It all sounded so simple in the book. Connect up the HDMI cable - OR the component video cable - and Robert is your mother's brother. Only with the HDMI cable connected the telly showed nothing but a whole lot of black, and with the component video cable the result was a different set of black that looked almost indistinguishable from the first lot.

Our screen being an older version of the Pioneer PDP505-XDE, all of the connections go through a media box, which has two sets of connectors for component in. I tried the other set. Bingo! Er... well... not "bingo" exactly. More "go bin". The picture from the PS3 was in black and white! And very grainy. Still, it was enough to run through the set-up procedures, download the odd firmware upgrade and that sort of thing. We even tried The Dark Knight for a few painful seconds.

Four years' waiting for this?! It's enough to make a grown man cry.