No improvement in visual quality when using AV cable?

Website · Post by **Lodestar** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:08 pm

I recently purchased the AV cables on this site for my Sega Genesis, 'cause I was tired of crappy RF quality (artifacts and what not)...but when I use these AV cables, I don't see an improvement at all!

Is the jump from RF to AV not as substantial as I thought it was? If there IS a difference, I can't tell because the lines are still there (not scan lines) and the colors look the same. I can notice the difference from AV to S-Video, or even S-Video to component - but maybe I'm missing something here.

Thanks

Post by **Scooter** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:19 pm

I haven't used RF for so very long I can't comment on the difference between the two, but I do have to ask: are you taking the AV cord directly to your TV? Might the picture quality issue be caused or at least contributed to by some other component in the system? Are you certain the cables are securely attached and that the connections don't have any corrosion?

Have you tried it out on a different TV to see if the issue might be with that particular TV?

Website · Post by **Lodestar** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:22 pm

I'll try it on another TV and edit this post when I'm done. Thanks for the suggestion.

EDIT:

Less noticeable, but I can still see it. It's like an overlay of vertical lines, it's very faint but I'm not sure if that's normal.

Post by **Scooter** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 2:50 pm

I have to wonder if your Genesis is outputing a flawed signal. Are you trying this on large modern TV sets? I've noticed that older systems don't often translate well to today's modern large screen TVs. Anything beyond 27 inch begins to look pretty crappy in my experience.

Post by **gravitone** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 3:06 pm

I assume you still have dot crawl and color bleeding. Both of these are solved by using a composite AV cable since the color information is still combined with the black&white image,transmitted through a single copper wire, and extrapolated at the other end in your tv set. Since these two signals interfere with eachother, and due to poor combining and separation, both dotcrawl and color bleeding occur. These cause the typical washed out picture and moving artifacts that we all hate. RF quality is basically the same, except that the composite videosignal is modulated to a different frequency so it can be picked up by a tuner. Poor components will usually further degrage the quality a bit though. RF modulators are pretty crappy most of the time. Picking up nasty noise and interference from the athmosphere, and other devices. The solution would be to use s-video, which is basically composite with separate color information through a seperate copper wire, or RGB which transmits each color component seperately. If you live in europe you can buy/make a RGB SCART cable and get the best image possible. In the US you won't be so lucky. The genesis doesn't support s-video. You can either get an RGB monitor and use that, or use a RGB to component transcoder to change the RGB signal into YPrPb. I hope this sheds some light on things.

Post by **Majors** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:22 pm

Back on my Turbo, I hooked up the RF directly to my tunner in my rotary dial TV (yep, that old) with a RCA cable. To do this I opened up my TV and removed the UHF dial parts, and it happend to have a RCA connector which made things easy. The point is, my TG look as good as any A/V I have ever seen, even though it was RF. Interference and static make more problems, so maybe your cable is running through a so-so swtich box or just too long?

Is it a Genny 1, 2 or 3?

I also have issue with running my classics on my HDTV...it like to upscan everything making it look crappy. My solution was to keep my old Sony 32" just for that (and it helps with lag on non-480p 2D fighters)

Website · Post by **Lodestar** » Mon Feb 25, 2008 6:35 pm

It's a model 2, and the cord is pretty short. The TV I have isn't very new, it's a CRT made by Panasonic and the most recent connector it has is component (but it can't do progressive scan).

Anyway, RGB is out of the question since I don't live in Europe and I don't have an RGB-compatible screen. I didn't know that the NTSC Genesis supported it, anyway.

Post by **ZenLogikos** » Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:32 am

I'm not trying to start any flame wars, but the Genesis is shitty hardware, especially the video processor. I had a Genesis, and have AND love my Dreamcast. Those vertical lines will not go away. I'm guessing they're totally vertical, cover the width of the screen, and are about 1cm apart. I'm not sure why some people don't notice these, but I saw them when I was a kid before I became technically savvy, and couldn't believe someone made a videogame system that had such a huge flaw.

Website · Post by **Lodestar** » Tue Feb 26, 2008 1:43 am

That sounds about right, heh.