I have a PS2 “dvd” player (yea yea…) and a three-comb filtered Sayno 27 inch flat screen TV. Would it be wise to pick up a 10 dollar S-video cable or would the quality be hardly different?
I notice a slight improvement in image quality with S-video over RCA (‘composite’). Mostly, you’ll see a reduction in the ‘fuzziness’ on the edges of objects, especially red objects that are often fuzzy or ‘flared’ with composite video. It’s probably worth $10.
In composite video (RCA), all the color signals are combined in one cable, which leads to interference between them, so some objects can be fuzzy. S-video separates one of the color signals (Y, i think) from the other two, but there are still two signals sharing a wire. (I know this is strange because S-video cables use a mini-DIN connector, but oh well.) Component video, which is available on even low-end DVD players now, has three separate cables for the video signals (Y, Cb and Cr). The interference is minimized and the improvement in color quality is quite noticeable, especially with DVDs. The problem is that component video cables are quite expensive – mine cost about a quarter as much as the DVD player itself.
Also, I guess I’m obligated to tell you that this is more of a General Questions kind of post. Maybe it’ll get moved.
This could be a IMPO post as well, but i want advicates versues people who think that it is a waste to get a better understanding. In GQ it usually will turn into random facts I already know, but little anecdotal evidence. So Mods move as you wish, but i figured this was the best choice.
You’d definitely notice an improvement in sharpness going from composite to s-video, but you’d probably see a larger improvement going from s-video to component.
The real problem is that cable mfr’s charge too much for component cables and consumers don’t know any better – you could use a $10 stereo+composite video cable for component, and the only difference is that the cable ends are labeled red/white/yellow instead of red/green/blue.
An S-video cable gives a notocible increase in image quality with video games, too – possibly even greater than with DVDs. This is bacause the static images in video games tend to cause a lot of pixel crawl (aka temporal aliasing, basically aliasing that moves) when using composite video, but the crawl is, as far as I can tell, eliminated when using S-video.