Seriously everyone I meet with a hdtv says that s-video looks terrible on it. I'm running s-video on a non hd crt and it looks beautiful. Why is it that hdtvs look bad using s-video? Is it because it has to scale the picture or something?
S-video in general is not a very good connection, at least from my experience. When using my old CRT s-video was slightly better then then composite connection. Also the s-video connection is limited in the data it is sending. It is unable to support an HD signal. ^_^_^
It scales up the picture as it can't send / support HD resolution. The result looks more than frustrating. Another aspect is the lack of scanlines which were essential in the result programmers wanted to achieve back in the 2D-times. Low-res 2D that actually required scanlines to look good just looks awful on an HD-TV that doesn't support neither the original resolution nor scanlines. And here a link to the best page to illustrate the problem: http://scanlines.hazard-city.de/
Your non-HD CRT, is using the S-Video data directly to draw the picture. It will look pretty good. The HDTV, can't run in 480i though. Most HDTVs have one or two modes. I think CRT HDTVs will often support 720p and 1080i. Atleast for awhile it was like that. These would be actual video modes, its not saying it can't support other signals. But the point is that when an HDTV is running off a 480i source, like a classic video game, it can't display it directly even if it's a CRT. The reason is that the CRT won't run in 480i. So because of this there are chips in these TVs that will scale/modify the 480i signal and adapt it to the HDTV's display resolution. The problem is this process sucks. It was designed for DVDs and regular TV sources. Not low resolution computer game graphics display.
This was covered in detail in a couple of threads around here recently. Older analogue signals look like shit on most HDTVs due to crappy scaling and horrible filtering. Just to clarify - S-Video doesn't send digital data.
This thread has plenty of discussion.. http://www.assemblergames.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21134 Lots of interesting stuff covered here, mainly with info from Alchy..
You can thank/blame GaijinPunch for this, mostly - I'm pretty sure it was him that corrected me in the past, and pointed me down the RGB route, years and years back. Now I'm a massive pedant about visual fidelity on my games. Ignorance is probably bliss, so thanks a fucking bunch, GP.
:lol: ...but it looks sooo much better! Even moreso now, with those crappy filters in LCD TVs. Why is this in the Arcade forum, by the way? Technically speaking, arcade machines don't do s-video. True, Americans may have to have an s-video circuit in a SuperGun, but any purist would be using it in RGB. As s-video is non-platform specific, and indeed not related to gaming per se, it would probably be better served in off topic, but would fit in general gaming. ;-)
it's probably the same difference playing stuff over vga on my lcd computer moniter and playing it on my crt. A lot of games look much better on the crt. Yay scanlines....yay I put this in the arcade section because I was thinking in terms of using a supergun or arcade emulation. My friend bought himself a hd lcd tv thinking that hd would make the picture more clear. It turned out not so great looking unless you're using a hd system on it. I have a friend with a new astro city. He bought a new moniter for it. Looks excellent. But honestly the difference between his screen and my crt running s-video isn't big enough for me to care.
