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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.
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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?
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.
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.
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."
Have to agree with you there - if you are concerned about "image quality", console gaming isn't probably where you want to be in the first place. The games are hard wired for an resolution that was last popular in gaming during the 486-early pentium era, and when you buy a modern PC with a modern video card (said video card costing 150% of an entire console, admittedly) you can have "image quality" that console gamers don't even *know they could* dream about.
(That said, I still play console games because they aren't in my home office, making it *appear* I'm not at the same computer activity I was at for the previous 12 hours working... obsessive compulsiveness I guess.)
Sig under construction since 1998.
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.
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).
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.
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!
>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
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
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.
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