Hi guys, I thought I would let you know that I done a comprehensive test of all third party rgb leads for the dreamcast and compared them to the official pal RGB cable.All leads were tested on my Phillips CM8833 rgb monitor. While the common Hong Kong leads were not a patch on the official cable for clarity and brightness, the blaze lead held up quite well. I tested about five cables all in, and will list them brand by brand with a rating for brightness, and clarity later on on new years day.There is a big difference between some of them and I do not know why this is. The official cable was by far the best of the lot(available in europe, known as the Scart lead, and is an official Sega cable for those who do not know).The picture quality it gives is nothing short of breathtaking and the difference between the DC's s video output and RGB is absolutely phenomonal with S video giving only a slight increase in picture quality over composite, whilst the RGB output is not too short of VGA quality on a rgb monitor.It really is amazing and I really reccomend the official cable to anyone who has RGB scart on their tv(nearly all of us in the uk) or has an rgb monitor abroad.You will be amazed at the picture difference betwen the official cable and the third party ones right away, the picture seems to be very dark on the third party and blaze leads and doesn't seem to get the colours(colors to you people in the US or Canada) through as clear either. I thought I would post this as more and more mebers of the board are going back to sample their Dreamcast's gaming delight with the release of Chaos Field in Japan.Do yourselves a favour and get one of these official cables as soon as you can.
I'll say the main difference could be in having capacitors on the red, green and blue lines, and other possible extra components - open up the SCART plugs and see what junk's in there (uncrew the screwy bit over the end of the wire, then the plug will just pull open). What's inside the plugs will definately show what makes the difference.
Err, its mostly the quality of the cable they use. Caps are usually virtually useless on PAL machines, but necessary to use imports.
Oh, didn't know that. Why are they necessary for imports? Are RGB outputs on NTSC systems different, and how do they differ? And would the cap's just make it worse if we don't actually need them?
Sega was and is also one of the only once's who 'gave' rgb leads with the system instead of those stupid composite cable's. (at least in Europe)
They didn't in PAL-I Land (the UK and Ireland), unfortunately - up until the PS2/GC/Xbox we always got even crappier RF cables with everything! Except with the Saturn for some reason, which came with a proper SCART lead.
If I remember correctly, caps on SNES machines should be removed as they made them worse, not sure about others... I'll see if I can dig anything up. I can't remember the theory behind it either... will look into that. Of course, I might be thinking backwards... perhaps it is NTSC that doesn't need them? Time to get my US specific leads out!!
Odd, I stopped using my official RGB lead and now use a 3rd party one (1e) as the official one gave the "high contrast buzz".
The Sega Saturn is a right bitch for high contrast buzz no matter what lead you use. In the UK I used RGB scarts and in Japan I use S-Video (Because recent Japanese TVs don't have Scart which is really stupid when old ones did) Is there any way to stop this? Yakumo
You know i found it odd they never intouced the scart connection here in the U.S. since alot of tvs bought here are from japan ex:sony, sharp, panasonic etc., still im wondering if them not putting scart connections in U.S models of their tvs is the reason why the recent ones dont have them. Of course it could be that dvi cables and component cables are more of the standard for highest quality display since all hd tv's seem to have them built in.
I think the reason of the absent scart sockets is tat they are quite expensive to integrate(at least that is what I have heard), also around the time of the scart uprise in the 1990's here in the uk, alot of manafacturers were also pushing s video, and they might have had their way over in japan and the US.After all, you can make alot of money from all the s vid leads and stuff, plus it is far less expensive to integrate into the TV(don't know if this is gospel,but I heard it from a pretty reliable source.).
I can't see SCART cables being that complicated to integrate into TV sets - composite video is standard on TVs (as even the tuner in the TV would output composite video), and RGB is the most elementary form of video - all video has to be converted to RGB somewhere along the line for it to go to the CRT/LCD/plasma screen, so I would have thought RGB inputs would be easier, if anything, to implement into a TV set compared to s-video or DVI or whatever else. There are some things that make SCART more complicated than anything else, though - there's a signal on one pin to tell the TV if the video going through the SCART cable is composite or RGB, and then there's the switching signal which will make the TV switch automatically to the AV input when whatever other device on the SCART cable sends it - though this isn't really necessary - a lot of older TVs never worked this way at all. There's also the issue that the cables, plugs and sockets are probably significantly more expensive to manufacture than anything else - there's 21 wires in a SCART cable, which also means there's 21 pins on the plugs and 21 pin holes on the sockets. This type of cabling and plugs and stuff is use only by SCART connections, and nothing else, so there's probably not a lot of people who even manufacture this stuff in relation to other connection types. Compare this to normal composite connections - they're just co-ax cable with yellow-coloured RCA plugs - probably the most generic things in the AV industry! And S-Video is just 5-pin mini-DIN plugs - also quite generic, and has a damn sight less wires in the cables compared to SCART! It wasn't really a Japanese thing - I know they had their own variant for a while, but it wasn't nearly as common as it was in Europe. SCART does stand for Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs, after all! I think Philips introduced it, though that doesn't really explain the French... Also, since the 70's most of the Japanese TV manufacturers made all their PAL TVs in the UK and Germany and other places in Europe (due to EU import restrictions or something), so I doubt sets sold in the US have much similarities to what's available here. Though from what I've seen on TV, new Philips sets look very similar...
