I’ll defend use of RGB/Component/S-video for PS2/Gamecube- I can think of very few games that used dithering on either system. Both could do transparencies and had no problem displaying a lot of colors simultaneously, etc.
Everything else, use composite to be on the safe side of seeing what the artists intended.
This makes sense, but the s-video (aka Y/C) signal shouldn’t need the same aggressive filtering required to separate the luma from the chroma in composite and RF, since they’re already separated, right? By that logic, it should have similar saturation to RGB, right?
Yep! Good point. I have no idea, lol. Maybe there is no NTSC color correction on these late model Wegas? Or it’s less aggressive?
I have a PAL PS2 and it still has the factory composite cable. Most TVs like 95% would accept either composite RCA or composite via scart. I’ve seen very few having s-video in PAL region (But there were cheap adapters that plug to scart and had an s-video reception). Scart was almost always there though.
That being said, s-video was a great alternative to RGB, looks fantastic from what I’ve seen.
S-Video is mostly a feature of bigger TVs (over 21") in PAL regions, and then in later years probably mostly incorporated into a second SCART port instead of a separate input.
Nintendo’s official connect options for PAL stand a bit out, because they are so mixed. SNES had apparently only official RF/Composite cables. Curiously, there was an official RGB cable for Japan…
N64 does output S-Video but no RGB.
Cube and Wii + Wii U don’t output S-Video.
Check it out here:
I wonder if all of the connections in that video were adjusted the same. The RGB one looks darker, even in gray values. If the brightness or contrast was set differently, that could also affect the look (especially after it’s been captured by a camera). It’s also possible that the SNES has different output levels for RGB.
SNES RGB definitely looks very different from the other outputs. The greens in particular are eye-searingly bright. I thought there was something with my Framemeister the first time I plugged it up over RGB lol
The colors are basically the same with this guy’s RGB mod on his crt - this is what we expected. Localized, blur-related desaturation. Not totally different colors. It’s mostly a difference in sharpness.
Were composite video colors that bad, in practice?
Not by a long shot! Especially on my Commodore 1702 on NES, SNES, TurboGrafx16 or TurboDuo.
Which is why my presets look the way they look.
It wasn’t bad on many other contemporary TVs of the era I used either, for example from Sharp and Samsung. Many folks probably through ignorance still used RF though and I could definitely notice the quality degradation.
Back in they day, I used to take my gaming PC around to different places and happily use the S-Video out converted to Composite via a cable and had some memorable fun and frenetic Bomberman sessions. Colours were always crisp and vibrant and the image was always sharp.
That’s a good shot. Just by eye-checking, it blurs Y (=no color areas) like 1 crt pixel (1/640 maybe even less, 0,5) and IQ like 3 crt pixels. Symmetrical left and right. So if ~600 is max in theory and IQ is around 1/7 of it (1+3+3) should be around ~80.
A few more shots showing that we are right about composite colors- color loss is localized and blur-related, mostly in reds and blues. Overall, colors are the same.
A few shots demonstrating the quality of S-video:
S-video can be as good as component (which is which?)
S-video can be as good as RGB:
S-video can be as good as RGB:
The S-Video there looks very good, I would assume the differences become more clear once feeding higher input resolutions and you need to distingush small elements, at least that’s my experience. E.g. the Windows XP desktop looks a deal fuzzier compared with RGB on my TV.
I guess composite connections were considered as next gen. compared with RF and a TV, where you had to calibrate the channel first, which also could have geometry quirks etc. 
For me, they were. There was just too much interference around, and RF never provided me a clean picture. Composite was way cleaner, with less artifacts and the image wouldn’t fall apart every time mom turned the blender on. And I did have to wait for it, since it took a lot of time before I had access to a TV with composite inputs. A few neighbors had them and I was always marveled when playing at their houses.
There were some systems that had superb composite, like the ps2 or the Amiga. I remember back in the day i got an Atari 520STE and the only cable i had was RF, picture was trash beyond belief. It was even hard to read 8 x 8 text on screen and some crazy interference going on. Amiga on the other hand with A520 modulator and composite cable was unbelievably good, super sharp and merging all dithering too.
Remember, though, that NES doesn’t have RGB output without a mod, which then uses a palette, just like an emulator, so they’re potentially using one of the NTSC palettes in that shot, which would, of course, make them look similar.
My childhood and teenage experiences with televisions were diverse, including Philips televisions from the 1970s or 1980s (assembled locally by EIC under the “AL-Qithara” brand). Most of my experiences with the Famicom (Clone) were with these televisions, of course, with RF connections.
The Sega Mega Drive was connected to a Panasonic television with a composite connection most of the time, and sometimes to a Philips (AL-Qithara) or even a small, old Sony via RF.
The PS1 was with a large 27-inch Sony (made in the 1980s, I think, and they were two televisions of the same size but completely different models) via composite, and often with a PAL color conversion (it use PS1 RGB as a base to PAL color reproduction).
The PS2 was also initially connected via composite, but later I tried RGB Scart with one of the big SONY televisions, and also I bought an LG television with a component connection (but I remember SONY with RGB Scart is better by a bit).
I can assure you that there are differences in every aspect between the connections and the TVs. Of course, the Sony’s picture was the best in every way. The others weren’t bad, but the Sony was the clearest and sharpest, etc.
At the time, I didn’t know that the Sega Mega Drive could take advantage of the limitations of composite.
Fortunately, I didn’t use anything sharper than composite on the PS1 either.
Also, while there were clear differences between the connections I tried, the differences also depend on the TV itself in handling the connections.
I remember one time I went to my uncle’s house and my cousin was playing PS1 on a TV from a Korean company, I think (because they were popular at the time). I was blown away by the amount of dot crawling on it!
also, PAL seems play nice with composite video (and even RF) than ntsc, it’s better in colors and almost everything except the frame rate (there is PAL 60, that PS1 “PAL color conversion” will output as PAL 60 in every ntsc game)
That’s a good point- the same had occurred to me. What do you think about the other shots I provided? I’m not seeing radical color differences, just the localized blurring/desaturation.
On SNES, at least, the color differences are quite noticeable IRL. I think macro pixel-pr0n shots are maybe not great for judging color differences.
Image quality-wise, s-video definitely looks closer to RGB than it does to composite, in my experience. Enough so that close up, it’s hard to tell them apart, aside from the slight chroma smearing that happens with s-video. The same color differences you see with composite vs RGB are there, though.
Maybe it’s the RGB -> YIQ/YUV colorspace conversion where the colors lose vibrance…?