So I discovered something the other day that some of you might find interesting/useful. Until recently I had gotten the general impression that Sony PVM units do not accept composite video as sync for RGB sources. In fact, more than one person has told me that specifically my unit, a PVM-20M2MDU, does not accept composite video as sync - only composite sync. After wondering about it for a while, I finally decided to do a very simple test: I took the sync from one of my consoles that I know works over RGB on my PVM and connected it to the composite video input. Surprisingly, I got a complete, color composite video image. I tested this on several consoles and many of them had the same results (the ones that didn't were using C-sync instead). So the only logical conclusion to draw is that my PVM does, in fact, accept composite video as sync. Another thing I noticed is that there seems to be a weak correlation, if there's one at all, between use of composite video as sync or C-sync, and video quality. There are cases of good and bad signals for both conditions. For example, my model 1 Genesis has an amazing picture, and it uses composite video as sync. Anyway, I hope this is useful to someone.
Let me see if i got this straight. If you feed composite video into the sync input it will decode it and display a full color picture without the RGB connections being hooked up?
No, no, you misunderstand. It's kinda the opposite of that: I have an RGB SCART cable which I know will display an RGB image on my PVM. If I take the sync from that and connect it to the composite video input of my PVM, I get an image. This tells me that my PVM accepts composite video as sync, because if the console was outputting C-sync, I would get a garbled image or no image. Instead I get a full color image.
If the console was outputting csync and you connect it to composite video input. You would get a white picture or no picture.
We'll, it's weird, most of the consoles I thought were C-sync give me no picture (black screen). However, my Saturn cable, which is supposedly C-sync (according to the guy I bought it from) gives me a weird, garbled image. It's hard to describe - it looks like just parts of the image are showing in negative colors. Definitely not a full image, more like little chunks of it. I can take some pictures if anyone's interested. Anyway, it works normally over RGB (though it has an average picture).
