The ecstacy

I love the Internet. It didn't take much more than a few minutes online research this morning to give me a clue why the PS3 wasn't talking to the telly. Armed with this information we took our second cups of coffee downstairs and I got busy with the various remotes (of which we now have FIVE - strewth!).

Along with its built-in digital (and now totally redundant analogue) tuner(s), the Pioneer's media box has four AV inputs. Four SEPARATELY CONFIGURABLE inputs. This is the key piece of information I'd forgotten. My excuse is that you only ever need to do this stuff once in a while (about once a year seems to be the average) so it's easy to let something slip the shackles of your mind. It may look like the box is configured correctly but if you hadn't first selected the correct input then you're actually looking at the wrong set of settings.

The HDMI interface (this box is so old that there is only one) is hard-wired to INPUT 3. So select INPUT 3 first, scroll down the options and what do you find? HDMI: DISABLED.

No real surprise then that the screen is blank! Flip that setting to HDMI: ENABLED (having first disconnected the other cabling options, and removed the XBox from INPUT 3 to avoid confusing the issue) and everything burst into life. Into glorious, technicolour, full HD life.

Well, not quite full HD. 1080i, in fact. Back when we bought this TV, 1080p was only available on really high-end gear costing more than twice as much. But easily good enough to blow yer socks off. We finished the rest of our coffee watching last week's Casualty on the iPlayer, streamed effortlessly and wirelessly to the PS3 and with a quality indistinguishable from a regular broadcast.

After that, it was off to the PlayStation online shop to download some game demos. The wireless connection held up brilliantly, despite the router being one floor up and on the other side of the house, and within minutes I was rattling a pinball around a high-def table in the demo version of Zen Pinball. Awesome.