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Console Image Quality Guide
Jakub writes "We've posted a comprehensive guide on how to improve your console's image quality. It covers everything from the various connectors through cables to fine-tuning by modifying sharpness and brightness. Though the article uses the prolific PlayStation 2 as an example, it applies equally well to all video devices."
Shielding
Heavy-Duty Double Shielding
Do you remember watching Enemy of the State and seeing the part when Gene Hackman explains how he does all his work inside a metal cage? That was an example of a Faraday cage. The basic idea behind a Faraday cage is that like charges repel, and therefore a charged conductor with zero resistance will have all of its charge on the surface. The inside is completely neutral.
Every piece of wire is a potential antenna and every wire is potential transmitter. So its important to prevent interference from radio stations and other electronics. Monster Cable uses a shield consisting of 100% aluminum Mylar foil and a 95% copper braid. Together they work to simulate a Faraday cage that will absorb the energy before it reaches the true signal carrying wire. Obviously its cannot be a perfect Faraday cage since its not fully sealed with no openings, but it works to reduce spurious signals from tainting the signal.
Super Fine Multi-Stranded Copper Conductor and Nitrogen Gas-Injected Dielectric
So far weve only talked about things Monster Cable has done to prevent signal problems. Now we get to talk about what Monster Cables do for transmitting the signal. The first element is the conductor itself. Monster has chosen to go with a fine multi-stranded copper design. This in itself isnt particularly noteworthy and there are approaches that promote the use of solid core conductors. Among multi-stranded copper designs however, the purity of the conductor will have the greatest impact and Monster hasnt given any specifics. Multi-stranded designs are also more flexible and tolerant of bending that solid core designs.
The dielectric, or the insulating sheath around the wire is Monster Cables own nitrogen-gas design. Any insulator next to two conductors will create a capacitor and store energy between the two wires. You may have learned that capacitors themselves are nothing more than plates of metal separated by air or a dielectric. Not only does the absorption of energy into the dielectric cause signal degradation, but that energy can also come back into the wire itself. Think of it as the charges are sticking to the edges of the wire as they travel down the wire.
The best dielectric is no dielectric: air. Of course, since an air-dielectric would lead to incredibly fragile cables, people turn to other materials such as PVC, polypropylene, and Teflon (probably the best). In addition, dielectrics can be transformed into foam, making its composition closer to air. Thats exactly what Monster Cable is doing with their Nitrogen Gas-Injected Dielectric.
Together, these features try to keep the video signal as strong as possible, and the impedance as close to 75-ohm as possible. When impedance is mismatched, you can get ghosting in images.
And now for the most important part, will these theoretical ideas carry over into our real-world testing?
The Monster Game Line-Up
Gamelink 200 - Composite Cable
(This model does not feature an 8-Cut Turbine Connnector.)
S-Video - Gamelink 300 Component Video - Gamelink 400 and Gamelink 400CVAA
The Gamelink 400 is a video-only cable that requires you to use the digital output for audio. The Gamelink 400CVAA includes the analog audio connectors for an additional $10. These component cables use silver content solder to connect the wire to the connector, minimizing signal loss.
Comparison #1: Reference Image
We begin with a test image from the THX Optimode software that's included with many DVDs today. To obtain a "true reference standard," we decoded the image on a PC using an IEEE-1180 double precision floating point decoder (64-bit). In simpler terms, we made sure that the decoding process kept as many numbers after the decimal point as possible. The rest of the images were captured with an ATI Rage Theater chip and saved as 24-bit TGA files, later converted to PNG for the web.
Reference THX image
Composite
Standard cable THX test image
Monster THX test image
The capture card had a much harder time "locking onto" the THX test signal with a standard A/V cable. We took about 50 images on both cables and every time, the standard A/V cable demonstrated poorer performance than the Gamelink 200. On the TV, the difference isn't anywhere as bad since the color patches are always in motion and so you never have a chance to see the problem quite so clearly. Nonetheless, this shows that the Monster Cable does provide a better signal to the capture card than the standard Sony A/V cable.
S-Video
Generic S-Video
Monster S-Video
These two look far more similar, and you can really see the advantage of S-Video. Even a generic S-Video cable outperforms a Monster Composite cable, but a Monster S-Video cable still takes the lead. When you zoom in, you can see that there is less noise with the Monster Cable.
Zoomed-in Generic S-Video
Zoomed-in Monster S-Video
Comparison #2: In-Game with MGS2 and GT3
Composite
MGS2 Standard MGS2 Monster
Since this shot in Metal Gear Solid 2 isnt as complex as the THX test image, the differences between Monster Cable and the standard cable are much less noticeable. The text on the Monster Cable is just slightly better than the excessive contrast of the text on the standard A/V cable.
S-Video
MGS2 Standard S-Video MGS2 Monster S-Video
Here, we can also see some of the checkerboard noise in the glass on the left side of the screen. Again, just barely.
Comparison #3: In-Game with Gran Turismo 3 Composite
GT3 Standard GT3 Monster
If you look at the Easy Level text on the upper left, you can see that the Monster Cable is slightly sharper with less dot crawl.
S-Video GT3
GT3 Standard S-Video GT3 Monster S-Video
On a good PC monitor, you should be able to see the differences in color rendition between Monster Cable S-Video and generic S-Video. The reds on the circles in the Laguna Seca logo and the red of the Viper itself are deeper and truer. We know that Monster Cable isnt exaggerating the red from the first example.
Verdict?
Even though we are limited by the quality of our screen capture equipment, these comparisons, particularly the test images, demonstrate with certainty that Monster Cable offers a slightly improved picture. Of course, the jump from composite to S-Video is much larger.
Cables are just the beginning
Contrast
With your cables out of the way, you're only half way to getting the best video performance from PS2. You need to tweak your TV settings. Fortunately, this is much easier. Most TVs are set to have a very high contrast and sharpness out of the box. Manufacturers do this to draw your attention to their TV set while you're in the store. At home, however, high contrast and sharpness are the bane of videophiles.
The larger your contrast ratio, the greater definition there is between white and black. Unfortunately, the contrast setting on your TV doesn't affect your contrast ratio and it's really just setting the white level. "Brightness" on your TV refers to the black level and sets how dark a black signal is displayed. The best way to adjust these settings is to get a test DVD or a movie with THX Optimode, however as a general rule of thumb, most uncalibrated TVs have their contrast set way too high. This causes blooming or "smearing" of bright white edges, reducing the fidelity of the image itself. If you don't have a DVD with test images, try to find a brightly lit scene and start playing with the contrast setting to see the difference. You want to get it as bright as possible without causing blooming or losing details on a very bright surface.
Sharpness
The sharpness circuitry found on your TV is primarily an edge enhancement technology designed for use with low-resolution sources. Unfortunately, this is simply adding information that doesn't really exist. Let's take a look at the FiringSquad.com logo we have the top of the screen. If run a sharpness filter to it, you might be tempted to say that the bottom image is "sharper."
Original
"Sharper"
"Sharpest"
Look at it again, are the lines sharper or just exaggerated? The gold gradient looks burned out. When we use a cross-hatch pattern to understand what the sharpness setting is doing, we can recognize that it is adding extra information that wasn't in the original source and is unwanted. These artifacts are called ringing. The only reason why sharpness may look better to the untrained eye is that it's harsher and grainier, which draws your attention. A high sharpness can also make aliased lines in 3D games look worse.
Unsharpened
Sharpened
Original FFX image Sharpened FFX image
Look at the vertical line at the upper right where I've added the arrow. When your sharpness is too high, it begins to add an unwanted white vertical line.
Monster S Titanic Original Sharpened image
Original zoomed Sharpened zoomed
In this shot from Titanic, we can see ringing artifacts on Rose's tie and collar. Oh, and in case you're curious to know why we've had a few Titanic shots, it's because this clip is from a very high-quality, high-bitrate demo disc from DTS that is an ideal test disc. Sometimes the best demo discs are the worst movies - the budget just went to the cinematography rather than the story.
Since DVDs and PlayStation 2 games have more than enough source resolution, you should turn down the sharpness setting for a more accurate picture. Initially, this may seem to make your picture softer, but that is only because you are used to seeing the added false data. You'll quickly recognize that images will look more natural, carrying a film-like depth and detail to the images.
Again, using a test DVD is the best way to get the correct setting, however you can look for other instances of those artifacts. One of the best places to look for these artifacts is a black line on a gray background. On some TVs you may still have artifacts after turning the sharpness all the way down to zero, while others aren't as bad.
You should also configure your PlayStation 2 DVD sharpening to -2. The default "+0" setting is actually adding a lot of artifacts to your picture. The -2 setting is the true "neutral" setting.
A Few Words on Audio
Jitter!
While Monster Cables also offer improved analog audio quality from your PS2, a digital optical cable will make a much larger difference. So, if you have a digital surround sound receiver, you should certainly consider using an optical connection. Not only will the sound be better, but youll have access to 5.1 surround sound DVDs and DTS music CDs. There are some people who will claim that digital cables are all the same since the 1s and 0s are always being transmitted if the cable works but this isnt entirely true due to something called jitter.
Let me ask you a simple question. Is there a difference between these two sentences?
Digital data is expected to run at 44.1kHz or 48kHz. Jitter occurs when the timing of the digital 1s and 0s is slightly off and the result can be a change to the character and sound of the audio. Although the words in our sentences above are identical, the timing is off. These small timing errors can have an audible difference particularly when jitter primarily affects certain frequencies.
The catch is that most games DO NOT have very high-resolution audio so jitter is unlikely to make any drastic changes to the sound quality. Moreover Dolby Digital and DTS use compressed datastreams that are reconstructed by the receiver meaning that its less sensitive to cable jitter.
A high-end digital cable will have its greatest advantage over a generic digital cable if youre dealing with conventional music CDs.
Comparing Digital Audio Cables
The problem is that the neither the Xbox or PS2 is an audiophile grade machine and so theres already quite a bit of jitter in outgoing signal. Initially, we compared the $30 3-meter Monster Game Lightwave 100, and a generic mini-plug to TOSLINK cable we had lying around. We hoped that relying on direct line-of-sight for transmission rather than using a real cable would magnify any differences, if there were any. That is, a mini-plug isnt the correct connector but for a fiber optic cable, light can still travel through the cable if its not perfectly aligned. Even so, we were not able to discern a noticeable difference between these two cables. However, when I used a very revealing piano piece on Telarcs A Window in Time (CD-80491) I was able to discern a slight improvement between the Monster Cable and the generic TOSLINK in blind testing. The improvement was barely perceptible on my audio system and my background as a pianist and long experience with critical listening probably gave me additional sensitivity that most people do not have. Even so, while I was able to identify the Monster Cable with statistical significance with 95% confidence, it was barely perceptible and I could only distinguish between the two optical cables with one track.
This is not to say that digital audio cables dont matter at all -- when we put in an audiophile-grade TOSLINK cable (that retails for just under $200 for three meters), our blind testing concluded that there was a slight improvement in transparency and a reduction in boominess on a wide-range of source material -- but even then, it was ever so slight. Still statistically significant, though. For those curious, the setup I was using was a Denon-AVR1602 in stereo mode with an 80Hz crossover. JBL HLS-610 bookshelves toed in on custom-built stands and bi-wired with 12AWG original Monster Cable and custom 5-pair 18AWG solid-core cable. An NHT SW2Si subwoofer was connected to an NHT SA-2 amplifier with the low pass crossover set 75Hz via Audioquest Type 4 cables. This isnt particularly high-end but the components work well as a whole for a very competitive sound.
With video, your variables are the console, the cable, and the TV. With audio, its much more complicated since you have to deal with speakers, speaker cable, amplifiers, pre-amps, DACs, and interconnects all playing a role. Every component is equally critical for good sound reproduction, but for most of us, there will be more benefit from improving other components in the chain, rather than digital interconnects.
So, the main advantage to using high-end optical cables on a console will just be the added durability and protection to the cable. That is, you can break an optical cable if its gets bent too much. High-end cables are designed to be flexible while resisting the excessive distortions that could cause damage.
Oh, horseshit. No TV is so clear that it doesn't do "natural" anti-aliasing, I don't care how good the picture or calibration is. Turn the goddamned sharpness level down, you have it too high. It doesn't do anything but introduce noise into the picture anyway. Learn what the fucking controls on your TV do.