Playstation and Saturn on HDTV

[Genesis Knight]

Shoot, I put this in the wrong forum; and in fact it's a double of information that's already out there. Can a mod delete/lock this?

I'm running my Japanese (first gen grey) Saturn and PSOne consoles on a Panny 42" plasma over S-video; big upgrade from composite but still a bunch of ghosting. I see there are SCART cables for Saturn and Playstation 1 on ebay; anyone run these through a Scart-to-HDMI converter box? Was thinking about trying it out but it'd be about 100 bucks.

[matacks]

Well, Im not wanting to be the bearer of bad news but I think the ghosting problem is the because of the plasma not your cables. Going with an HDMI cable and a converter set-up may make it look a lot better but I would think your still going to get that ghosting if you use that TV. When I was buying a TV, the dude at best buy told me to avoid plasmas for gaming because of the problems associated with burn-in on those TV's when used for gaming. I ended up getting an lcd. If you can get a different TV, a nice quality lcd with a refresh rate of at least 120 Mhz (240 Mhz is available now but its debatable if the faster refresh rate is notciable) should have you gaming away with out any ghosting or burn in.

or you could spend $100 and try to find a nice used CRT off craigslist or wherever. Perhaps one that hasn't darkened too badly from aging. That would work good with your S-video. It seems like CRT TV's are highly praised on this forum for old school gaming.

[Genesis Knight]

Hmm, seems there's a bit of misinformation in what that salesman told you. Modern plasmas are basically immune to permanent burn in. I regularly play Gears of War and Halo Reach for 6 hours at a time on game nights with my buddies and have never had any problems. The Panasonic I have is also great at upscaling SD content and has a fantastic natural contrast ratio compared to similar LCD televisions, it's just I want a cleaner connection.

I think when I said ghosting you thought motion ghosting? That's probably why you mentioned refresh rates? I'm talking about that 'dirty image' duplication effect where low quality SD signals are mirrored one pixel line to the left or right, like a shadow.

Thanks for the comments though.

[matacks]

oh when I meant ghosting I was refering to burn in. I think thats what it means. If your plasma is working great for your gaming thats terrific. Perhaps it the older plasma TV's that the best buy dude was refering to which are not as good. It was actually over two years ago when I spoke to that guy about TV's.

I still think the CRT is sweet though. Evenutally when I set up a game room I'm gonna let aesthetics go all to hell and have a wall with multiple TV's covering it.

[ChuChu Flamingo]

How new is your panasonic plasma? I believe what you are experiencing is ghosting, as that is what causes that double image.

As far as getting a cleaner signal, I would recommend RGB via scart then converted to YUV. But you would probably require a upscaler of some sort because 240p likes to get misinterpreted as 480i. When this happens on your HDTV it will either display no signal or look like someone turned down the refresh rate and flickering everywhere. And we can't have any of that.

One way to test if 240p works or not is to pop in Disgaea via component on PS2 or a PS1 game through component.

Here is a site that explains in great detail that I suggest you read. Really neat information here.

http://retrogaming.hazard-city.de/