Yeah, I don't know what happen there. I noticed the same thing. Too bad, too, since I haven't gotten around to picking one up myself. The cost from suppliers probably went up, possibly because the cost of production went up (more on that later).
For any one that might be interested, here's what I'm gonna do to avoid the high price, but soldering is required...
Normally I would just get the plug that the Saturn AV cables use (which is a male 10-pin mini-DIN) but apparently that plug isn't standard so it's a little hard to locate (which might be why production costs went up) if at all. The idea is that the plug should only be $2 or $3, then all you need is an S-Video cable and
RCA audio cables, or a
combined S-Video/Audio cable, then Google the Saturn AV pinout and solder the wires. If you have the spare cables lying around, it'll only cost you a couple bucks for the plug. Otherwise, just buy some cables from Wal Mart or whatever you can find them the cheapest.
But being that it might be impossible to locate the 10-pin min-DIN plug, if I ever get around to it, I'll just jump the S-Video and audio connections internally and put standard S-Video out on the console, in which case I can just use standard S-Video and RCA audio cables. Similar to what people do when the do an AV mod to a console, like
adding S-Video to a Genesis (picture isn't mine) or NeoGeo. Those case mounted connections will only cost you a few bucks total. The Saturn case is huge, so it'll be pretty easy to mount those jacks. Though I don't like drilling holes in consoles, so I'll probably just run plugs out the back of the console like I do with the Genesis (
example of the model 1 Genesis I use to own). The Saturn makes it easy to do this since it has the battery door, I can just run the plugs out of that.
This would work perfect for me. In my retro room, I don't have any consoles hooked up. When I want to play a console, I take it down from the shelf and plug it into my TV's front AV ports. So since I'm already using standard S-Video and composite AV cables for other consoles, I could just use the same cables for the Saturn. Adding S-Video output would only costs me maybe $5 for the plugs, assuming I don't already have them lying around (which I actually might now that I think about it). Though I realize that if you keep your consoles hooked up all the time, and thus don't share the AV cables, you might have to buy S-Video and audio cables, and that might not make this option cost effective. Though you could probably get a 6' S-video/Audio cable off Amazon for like five bucks. So that plus the cost of the plugs would be $10 if not less, so that's half the price of buying the Saturn S-Video cable.
. But I would probably screw up at least once, so there would go any savings.
It not only looks as good but better and vibrant i am very happy with my purchase and don't feel the need to convert to scart it is beautiful as is
