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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."
My console is text-only. Are these console-images a new feature in the Linux 8.0 that just came out?
Fleur de Sel
I think those would be a good start. If they don't help, try:
If after following these steps your image quality hasn't improved, consider taking the console back for a refund. Or better yet, just send it to me and I'll take care of it for you.
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
This really isn't about improving your image quality. This article is one giant add for monster cable. When you buy monster cable you not only pay for cable you also pay for advertising. There are other good cables out there.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
Tips for getting the most out of a Walmart Keyboard
Is your toast the best it can be? Read on to find out...
Super Mario Bros. Tips and Tricks - How to run AND JUMP in COMBINATION!
And finally:
Screws: Righty-tighty or do they work better if you use hammers?
That way you can up the resolution to 1280x960 or higher. As far as I know, there are no televisions that can display that high of a resolution yet. But really, they should include the option of VGA out on consoles.
How about a guide on how to improve your webserver's traffic-handling capabilities.
If you want to get your TV perfectly calibrated, hire a professional. Second best thing to do is pick up Avia's Video Essentials. I would definitely take this "guide" with a grain of salt. They gloss over one of the most important issues of video calibration, which is that you have to calibrate it with the amount of ambient light that would normally be present with normal usage.
Also, they could HEAR the difference between two different TOSLINK cables? Gimme a break. Sounds like a sponsored ad for Monster cable, whom audiophiles know is a rip-off anyways.
Laugh all you want, I enhanced the display on my GBA using the undocumented brightness knob and now I can see *erverything*.
Um... what's that fizzing noise?
Am I the only one who heard Roxette to sing "I'm gonna get blitzed for some sex"?
Not sure which one to buy, but apparently (and according to everyone in the office who bought it - damn my television's 1 S-Video!) the difference between RCA and S-Video is nothing short of stunning. Not sure if the monster cable is worth however much extra they get over the Microsoft (or generic) kit, but if you have the ability, get the S-Video cable.
Now if it only helped the gameplay...
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
Dear Sirs,
I cannot find any information on your site about my "Scart" connection, which is the only other input my TV has - surely such a basic connection should have been covered in your "Comprehesive" guide to improving image quality.
Yours Faithfully
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
I like a little bit of a less than perfect image on my tv because it gives it a little bit of an antialiased look smoothing out some of the blocky edges that you get when you tweak everything. Sure a nice sharp image is great for 2D stuff but just the little bit of blur looks nice for 3D.
Ok, here's what the article says in 1 paragraph as opposed to their >5 pages. Use A/V cables over RF, use S-Video over A/V, and use Component over S-Video. Also buy a monster cable if you can justify the expense to your wife/parents. Then, turn down the contrast and sharpness on your TV and PS2 because they do nothing to add to the image. The end. Was any of this a no-brainer to you? It all was for me.
...and all you have to do is wait for some good games. :b (Just kidding, XBox fans, please don't regale me with tedious lists of games past, present and future...)
I'm quite happy with my current gaming setup, though, which runs the XBox, PS2, GC, Dreamcast, PSX, N64, Saturn, SNES, Megadrive, Jaguar, 3DO, and Atari 2600 (also the DVD player and satellite TV) through a *big* switcher box into a projector, which gives a nice bright 68" viewable screen. Only one thing missing from the setup - a fridge full of beer within arm's reach...
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
Damn M$, And thanks, SlashDot, for setting me straight yet again!
I can't even get to the article, but it seems pretty simple.
Don't use the composite video cables that came with your system. All kinds of TVs from 19" on up now ship with S-Video and even Component inputs (JVC ships a 20", 25", and 27" TV with component-in), so if you're anywhere near being in the market for a TV, there's no reason why you shouldn't be getting one with those inputs. $25 gets you the Sony-brand component cables, ditto for Nintendo (although you have to order them off of Nintendo's website). XBox component cables have been a little cheaper, $20 at most places, but the cables themselves look kind of cheap.
While the difference between S-Video and Component isn't quite as pronounced (I mostly only see the difference in the colors, not in the fidelity of the picture), the difference between composite and either of the upper-tier inputs is enormously pronounced. On larger televisions in particular (32" and up), you can see very pronounced scan lines and blurriness of the image when using composite cables. The Nintendo Gamecube can give you a great demonstration fo this fact. The back of the unit has the standard video-out and then the "digital-out" port where the component video hooks in. You have to have both jacks connected and active, since the video is only fed on the component port, and the analog audio is still fed along with the composite video. Hook up both signals, turn on a game, and just flip back and forth between component and composite. You'll see what I mean.
In the past I also believed that I could improve my VCR's image quality by using chinch or scart instead of the antenna-cable. It appears to be common knowledge that by using better cables the image quality improves. However that is just the theory. I read an article where a german electronics-magazine (was it "Video"?) really checked the signal's quality using all kinds of cables. They let both human testers rate the quality, and they also checked it with expensive gadgets. The result was surprising: Neighter the human testers, nor the devices would see any difference. The quality was the same, so matter whether they used the antenna-input, chinch, scart or even rgb-cables.
I believe that the "screenshots" in this article are fake. A little blur in Photoshop helps them to sell their expenisive cables.
There's a real cult around expensive cables, especially amoung the audiophile croud. It's simply ridiciculous that some people who have a 5000$ stereo spend 1000$ on the cables. There is no difference in sound. A copper-cable's resistance is the same, no matter wheter you payed 20$ or 300$ for the cable.
Please slashdoters. Don't believe that crap.
ciao
What do you do when you see an endangered animal eating an endangered plant?
As one reader noted it would have been interesting if they actually wrote about something other than cables, eg how to set up your TV/HDTV/projector to make things look as good as possible, how VGA-boxes compare and so forth. And as far as I am concerned, Monster Cable are not by far the only manufacturer of high-end cables. Interact make some good stuff too, and about a million Hong Kong-manufacturers have different budget variants that will improve your results, if not by as much.
More specifically, a note that while MC do produce S-Video cables for all recent consoles, the PAL GameCubes do not support this kind of output, and thus a little test of RGB-Scarts wouldn't have been such a bad idea, eh? Especially considering that more people have Scart/Euro-connectors than S-video on their TVs, and that an RGB-Scart is easily on par with S-video output.
Since most people also only have one "good" Scart input on their TV set, a little write-up on different Scart-splitters and how they affect the quality would have been nice too.
Well, well, just a few thoughts. I guess we'll have to test these things ourselves, seeing as they who wrote the article are sponsored by MC and not interested in alternatives, which the consumer always is...
"If you go to the next town, going across a desert is a shorter way." - Pu-Li-Ru-La (Taito)
I had a spare 21" monitor here, so I thought it would be nice to buy a vga adaptor for my playstation 2.
It's definately not worth the money:
-some games were black/white, it had something to do with the pal/ntsc switching of the console.
-the games that were displayed in color were in some sort of scanlined resolution on the monitor with a very low refresh-rate.
-there was no way to tweak the settings.
A couple months later I bought a better scart adaptor for my television set, which made the image a lot clearer and I gave the monitor to my little brother.
Ok, we know S-Video is better: I use it from the HP P3 500 (movie box) I have behind my big screen to the TV's S-Video input.
/.'ers running for the box o' old cables in the basement)
But buy S-Video cables? Hey they are 'spensive. But there's a great substitute, and you probably have one in your basement right now.
Old-style Mac ADB (printer/modem) cables are perfect as S-Video cables: same pin arrangement. (Sound of 5,000
Funny that in my house, a PC is connected to a Toshiba projection screen via an old Mac cable. B) Yep, Apple just keeps on giving.
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
could have done something to it.. the zoomed images are a bit sketchy, and come on, tv card in for video comparision? come on, besides, if he's using tv-card for playing console games he would be using dscaler and it's filters if he had brains.
the article just boils down to this: "svideo is better than composite". now really, IS THIS A GUIDE???
where's RGB??
and some better guide would have mentioned things like getting a vga adapter or rgb connectors where possible..(dreamcast has some vga thingy at least)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
What about those of us with rabbit ears and bow-tie connected to the two screws? I ain't runnin' out to get a fancy new TV just to get an "rf connector", when my TV still works!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
...games are blurry on the PS2 is because the system has a bottleneck, 4 megs of VRAM. In order to have more RAM for textures etc, they halve the vertical resolution and then interpolate the image.
:P
No connector's gonna fix that.
Jusp upgrade the drivers, or better yet, upgrade the graphics card and add some RAM.
Ohhh, wait. Console image quality.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
From the article:
Designing speaker and video cable takes a lot of science
This certainly isn't true when it comes to speaker cable - the audio cable industry would impress even PT Barnum, I'm sure he didn't realise just what suckers people are.
And note the distinct lack of any actual scientific testing of the cable and no comparison amongst S-Video cables. You'll see the same thing in audiophile magazines in their so-called cable reviews. If we're going to use subjective tests then I can say that the picture I get with my cheap S-video cable looks just like the one they're getting with the Monster Cable.
Reality is that any decent quality cable will give you the same results as a cable that costs thousands of dollars. And when it comes to speaker cable decent grade lamp flex will equal any cable out there unless you happen to have your speakers at least 50m from your amp (differences are only really even significantly measurable at around 100m and up).
I have to use really expensive brand-name cables to make the video output from my game consoles look good?
;)
I thought that all I needed to do was run a green pen around the edge of the discs to get optimal picture and sound quality - or does that only work on the older CD-based consoles?
-- Rick
About the cheapest image upgrade you can do, if you don't mind a small image, is almost any composite CGA monitor. The image quality is much higher than almost any non-HDTV TV set.
Boobies never hurt anyone. - Sherry Glaser.
Buy a Monster S-Video Cable. Other brands are not as good. (Supported by my experience. I tried a $10 S-Video cable and it was crap, could hardly see the screen)
Specifically:
S-Video - Gamelink 300 Component Video - Gamelink 400 and Gamelink 400CVAA
Composite video is far worse than S-Video. Don't pick a Monster Composite cable over a generic S-Video cable.
Turn down the contract on your TV. Default settings have the contrast and brightness set too high. Easier to see in a store, but causes problems with bright images and scenes.
Turn down the sharpness on your TV for DVDs and games. Digital images are mangled by excessive sharpness, and reducing it will result in softer, more realistic images. Sharpness just adds data that isn't there to digital images.
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.
Use an optical audio cable if available. This reduces Jitter, even over a digital audio cable. Most users will not notice the difference between a decent optical audio cable and a an ultra high end one.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
And any true audiophile who has done a blind test (switching the cables on their system using EXACTLY the same speakers/reciever/amps) will tell you that cables aren't important and that the rest of the audiophiles have been fed a line.
Any such audiophile who does research on the physics of cables will come up with the knowledge that the very, very, slight benefits of higher end cables can only be achieved at lengths of greater than about HALF A MILE.
You can argue this 'till you're blue in the face, of course, but I suggest that instead you use the scientific method: hook your cheap cables and your good cables up to a switch so that all the other equipment is the same. See if it makes any difference whatsoever.
I have a friend with a LOT of monster cable who became a bit depressed after this test, because he owned a LOT of Monster cable. He could have spent the money on even more expensive speakers to actually improve his sound.
Qualifier: there is a difference between shielded and unshielded, twisted pair, and straight. However, there is very little difference between Radio Shack 16 gauge shielded, twisted pair and Monster 16 gauge shielded, twisted pair.
My qualifications: I've been a sound technician for 9 years now, and a musician for 17 years. I can play four instruments, have a vocal range of three octaves. I have worked VERY hard to have a critical ear over this time period, and I think I do.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
The article states that "...many Xbox games are in HDTV and progressive scan", and then goes on to put down PS2 and Gamecube because of their lack of such games. However, no HDTV games exist for Xbox. Yes, they have some in 480p, and several in 16:9, but no 720p or 1080i games. TestDrive was rumored to be 1080i, but lets face it, that box is going to have problems pushing that res and a respectable frame rate. On paper it may be possible, but we have yet to see it. The article unfairly puts down PS2 and GC. Cheers, Josh
>We did a blindfold test. I could hear the difference in microphone cables. Line level cables are harder but at least 80% of the class still got it.
EE says that's highly unlikely, unless you were comparing something like balanced vs. unbalanced cables. I really, really, really doubt that a reasonbly cheap Mic cable (not the absolute bottom barrel) and an expensive Mic cable have anything different other than durability (I think a 2-input summing/inverting Oscilloscope could show there's no difference). But, in the home stereo world, you don't get balanced, so you need to stick with decent quality cables.
If you're really worried, use RG-6 satellite cable for home stereo stuff. Cheap, easy to get ahold of, and if the quality is good enough to carry 1 GHz 100 ft., 20 kHz is not going to be a problem.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between minidisc and CD and MP3.
Go here and read it. 320 kbps MP3 (which is similar to MD for recording time) is better, bar none, when coupled with a decent encoder and decoder. It actually picks up more of the (admittedly useless) frequencies that the MD doesn't.
>Furthermore you can hear the difference between a 2 million dollar Sony Oxford and a Behringer and an SSL.
Can't fault you there. But most people don't have a 2 million dollar budget.
>If you could not tell a difference professional studios would just use shit cables.
No they wouldn't. In a professional studio, cables get stepped on, ends crushed, and they get yanked out of the sockets by the cable. They need the durability that a good cable brings. Not to mention that you're looking at 100ft.+ runs -- you don't want a cable with high resistance. They don't need a cable that goes flaky the fist time the audio engineer rolls his chair over it.
>There is a difference its just that for some electrical applications the difference is less.
Seriously, electrical applications (by which I'll assume all electronic applications) often work in the Ghz range. Even a $100/ft. Balanced XLR cord won't handle that, nosiree.
But audio frequencies aren't even within a factor of 100 of that.
>Use good cables for speakers
Use 16 or (if you can find it and have high-current speakers/stereos) 14 AWG lamp cord for speakers. Nice and flexible, and unless you run it parallel with your fluorescent light ballasts/power cables, very clean sound.
>Use pretty good cables for line level signals and you should be ok.
Of any signals, line level reqiures the best cables. We're talking less than 1V signal level in some applications. Thin, crappy cable will not do.
Just my 2 cents.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
Monster Cables are like Bose products or Sony Home theater, a joke. All 3 are a text book lesson in genius marketing and polishing shit.
Make no mistake, cables make a difference to those who care and Monsters products are worlds better then what comes out of the box or from wallmart. But they do not represent a good value-performance ratio. For the same amount you can buy a lesser marketed but more respected cable that is far superior. Many people will tell you that when you buy Monster or Bose you are paying for all their bright shiny ads in the magazines. This is very true, your dollars go to more marketing and not so much R&D or quaility materials/manufacturing.
Im not one of the crazy bastards who spends $15,000 on one speaker cable. I think if you add up all my cables it would total less then $3000. Many people who watch a movie at my house are blown away. There are also a lot of people who are convinced that it doesn't look any better then there 20'' Magnavox tv thats 10yrs old and conencted to an old VCR. Its quite simple, they are WRONG WRONG WRONG. At the same time, they do not know enough or care enough about the picture or sound to invest a dime in their equipment. I may not agree with them, I may think they are farking idiots, but I must respect their opinion.
P.S. Despite the many mentions of Monster Cable, I think this was a great article for educating people on the different connections, and the bennefits of investing in good cables.
bettercables.com
vampirewire.com
vandenhull.com
As long as consoles output to NTSC devices, image quality will always be substandard. I don't know why more don't include a direct VGA/RGB output so they can actually display sharp images at decent resolutions. The NTSC standard is limited to some 4-500 lines of resolution, with no specific horizontal resolution set. It's interlaced at that, and only provides 29.97 frames per second maximum refresh. If you wanted higher quality, technically the best thing would be to get a PAL tv and Playstation so your resolution is higher at 625!
In reality, TVs and these modulation standards weren't designed with high resoltion, sharp images in mind, which is why they will ALWAYS look like garbage compared to their PC counterparts. You're an absolute fool if you spend $30-50 on a stupid Monster cable to try to make this look any better. That's like someone getting a $50 monster cable to improve the resolution of their atari 2600!
Hopefully HDTV will fix this discrepancy, but the price for a HDTV set right now is still astronomical compared to a 21" computer monitor. I'm not very famiiar with the new consoles, but I know they process their video as RGB, so is there a way to bypass the modulator?
Sharpness should always be down low, especially on a nice TV. All sharpness does is add data to the picture that was not there originally. In this case, it makes the edges stand out by increasing the contrast between dark and light areas. This is bad. If you want that film to look as good as it did in the theatre, turn the sharpness DOWN. Use Avia to get it set correctly. Same thing goes for the games, the sharpness needs to be down, or it just adds crap to the picture that shouldn't be there.
Sharpness is jacked up high for showroom floors, so the picture looks artifically clear in the bright lights. In an ideal setting, you turn it way down.
"And like that
Excuuse me, but umm.. you're watching a TV set which has at max.. what maybe 500 lines with S-Video? Let's see that would be at least 100 lines less of vertical resolution than my crappiest computer display system.
No TV game is going to compare to a 1600 x 1200 computer display because it's well, a TV game that you watch on a TV. Improving the image quality of your TV set is like improving the performance of your Yugo. When all is said and done, you still have... a Yugo.
I understand that most people don't have a 40 inch computer monitor, but still you can only go so far with image quality on an NTSC television set. TVs are not high resolution display devices by definition.
Vortran out
Knowledge is like ignorance.. too much can be just as bad as not enough.
I further want to know why jitter would have those particular effects on the sound before I believe it's not something else.
It seems highly unlikely (Though possible) to me that a system capable of reproducing DTS (or just AC3, like my sony cheapie receiver (which is hooked up to my PC with a creative SB live, which is pretty lame for various reasons) would have any problem transmitting PCM. I know that MPEG has its own ways of correcting for those kinds of problems but bear with me anyway.
So if the system is even capable of doing AC3 or DTS, I'd think that it would have no trouble running over some cheap-ass copper given that it's a digital signal and some degradation shouldn't matter, as one would hope our signal voltage is much higher than our trigger voltage. I suppose the trigger varies somewhat. Stats on that might be interesting. Fiber should be even easier, though the quality will vary there as well. I don't exactly have the kind of system (the sb live, remember?) to do any serious testing along those lines, and I'm not about to go look up specifications on copper wire and cheap fiber and so on, I have other shit to do :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was pleasently surprise to discover one of the bonus features on the Tron DVD was a pretty comprehensive utility that you can run through to improve the image quality on your TV.
From what I understand, a good portion of poor image quality has to do with improper television settings. After I ran through that utility, the picture quality on my TV was dramatically improved.
I wonder why more DVDs don't do this, or even video game consols. It just seems like such a good idea to improve the quality of the experience.
The Internet is generally stupid
While I grant that /most/ people probably have an F-type connection on the back of their tv, I think assuming ALL have it is probably a little much. There's always one.
My real point though is that this is about where I stopped reading. F-type is the oldest and worst? Has he never seen/played a console on a tv connected with a 300 Ohm connection? I'm going to guess he probably hasn't. To me, this little slip just confirms my original thought upon browsing through his little "guide" that he really doesn't have a clue, and is just regurgitation what some sucker-savvy salesman told him about "Monster Cable".
Save your money. It's not worth it. Good cables are important, and can give you a better, or more reliably quality experience, but you don't need to buy monster cables to get that. Buy any of the higher end cables from any of the major electronics retailers and you'll get the same thing. Or even the walmart one.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
I have monitors capable of dealing with S-Video, RGB and composite at home, and i can say that my PS2 using RGB (through a cheapo PS1 SCART cable) gives me a picture so good people literally don't believe it is a console generating it.
The PS1 of course also looks great through RGB.
S-Video is a minor improvement over composite video, but it still doesn't hold up when compared to RGB input.
However, most people are stuck with composite, and a major improvement in signal quality can be had simply by using a good quality 75 ohm video cable to run composite video across.
I had the good fortune to buy an Iomega Buz card some years ago, and found it came with a short high-quality 75ohm coax video cable. Simply using this interconnect instead of the skinny little video cable provided by most consumer video equipment suppliers gives a major (and i do mean major) increase in visual quality. this was an eye-opener for me, and ever since then I have made my own composite video cables out of cheap 75 ohm coax (NZ$2 per meter retail), with excellent results.
Especially improved is the composite output of one of my cheap scan converters for displaying VGA on a TV.
Unfortunately, this is not really an option on the PS2/later PS1s/Dreamcast - though my old 1000-series PS1 has 'standard' RCA connectors on the back (dunno about the X-Box, i don't own one) since they use a proprietary connector on the end of crappy, low-quality composite cables.
W/regard to the superiority of 'Monster' or similar 'branded' cables, I believe this is a total crock, and anyone who would try and claim 'higher quality' on things like digital interconnects, or claim there is some benefit in 'directional' speaker cables etc. is clearly a liar, and those hi-fi magazine reviewer clowns who claim they can hear a 'day and night difference' between various cables and digital (digital!) interconnects are liars too.
Using a cable with a signal-loss and power-handling rating that matches your application will always give you an improvement in quality over a cable that doesn't, however you don't need to pay a massive premium for the privilege of using such a cable.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Their expalation of jitter is total misinformation.
First, no significant difference is going to be seen in the jitter caused by two different 75 ohm coaxial cables (or fiber optic cables). Second, any data sent across a TOSLINK cable gets synched up to an amplifiers internal clock before being d/a converted, so my first point doesn't even matter. In a fair test, using lab equipment, instead of hearsay, they would not be able to tell the difference between a "standard" coaxial or optical toslink cable and moster cable. That's why the data is sent in digital format in the first place.
This:
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.
Or this:
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
is a total lie. In a double-blind test there is no diffrence.
Life is too short to proofread.
My setup that I have made a year ago, is relatively cheap (the only non-computer expensive component is Proxima Ovation, an old LCD projection panel) and nice enough to displace a TV from my living room. Original version used composite video from PS2 to the TV capture board instead of S-Video, and image quality was pretty terrible. VCR's tuner happened to be better than one built into the capture board, and I didn't care much for improving audio quality beyond a reasonable level, so audio goes through rather cheap components.
LCD panel, projector and PC produce more noise than what I would prefer, and adjusting image on a projector was a pain in the neck (Proxima's bit depth sucks), but in the end image quality ended up being far superior to a TV. I have found out that in this configuration xawtv works better with Xv disabled, and many games look terrible if blown to a full 1024x768 screen, so I keep them at the NTSC resolution. DVDs are played with Ogle on a computer.
Proxima Ovation has S-Video and composite inputs, however the scaling algorithm that it uses for them, is absolutely horrible.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Name an activity, and the enthusiasts get gouged. Fishing, skiing, wine, cars - they all end up paying twice as much for things that are maybe 10% better.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
which cables? Since I'm an A/V newbie.
What brands would people recommend for:
1. Cables? (Less then $200)
2. Projection TVs? (Less then $3k)
3. Switcher Box? (Less then $200)
4. Speakers (5.1 or better) (Less then $500)
from Tweeter, Best Buy, or Radio Shack since they are the closest A/V stores.
Cheers
5. Receiver (Less then $500)