Were composite video colors that bad, in practice?

I think the main reason is that they haven’t experienced the older games in their original environments (and this is one of the drawbacks of emulators) And unfortunately, there are even old people who prefer a raster sharp image and consider sharp the most important criterion for quality

That’s basically a scam monitor because the dot pitch is so high for it’s size that it can’t resolve the EGA/VGA standard resolutions. High pitch monitors of comparable size had usually 0.39 mm pitch (dot) or 0.41 (slot).

The original CRT to go with EGA by IBM (the IBM 5154) in 1984 already had a pitch of 0.31mm.

There’s bunch of pics around from a 80s PC-98 monitor with 0.39mm. PC-98 outputs at 640x400.

Source image:

PC-KD854N-PC-98_6_Original

It doesn’t look that much different on my 0.28mm monitor though, patterns just get lost in tiny scanlines.

Back to colors though, the differences for this game on Chris McCovell’s RGB vs.composite page always seemed a little drastic for me. Capture-specific or within range on TVs?

MagicalHat_RGB

MagicalHat-Composite

Game pictured is Magical Hat No Buttobi Tabo! Daibouken. From what I could find, the anime intro looks more like the top, and this looks like it could be from real hardware:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qKk62aqmAw

2 Likes

Don’t these captures skip the TV’s decoding/color correction?

I know, anyway the point is back then there are no raster sharp image like how we see those games in emus today since they use VGA which is analog and has some smoothing/blur (it’s not as strong as Composite, of course; in fact, it’s the least among the others, but it exists)

Also, even if it was a scam monitor, it was one of the options and not an anomaly. According to the video, it was a common practice to offer cheap options, and most people go with cheap price

maybe it worth to see how VGA LCD output, I searched on YouTube before but couldn’t find a suitable video. However, generally speaking, based on what I saw in one video, the main difference between VGA CRT and VGA LCD is in brightness, aliasing, and flickering, aside from input lag which doesn’t concern us here

1 Like

the capture card do the decoding/color correction, but not as CRT TV but more like LCD/LED one

1 Like

Yeah that sounds right. It’s missing the consumer red push and the consumer saturation boost

Looking at shots more closely, there are also differences I consider drastic in other shots and it’s not console specific. If that’s explained by missing a TV in the chain, I should see something similar when feeding various composite NTSC content into my grabber?

1 Like

I suspect you’ll get similar (but not exact) results, kind of desaturated and lacking punch. Edit, actually, IDK what’s going on, it’s more than just a missing red push or saturation. I think it could be specific to that capture device.

Oh sure, I didn’t mean to imply that there aren’t significant differences between CRTs and LCDs. I’ve also seen notable differences between VGA and digital connections on the same display, though I suppose this in part because the manufacturers didn’t care that much about quality of analog anymore.

I also have two LCD TVs with 640x480 res and VGA input, 8" and 20". Here is that part with the flowers on the right from before on the 20".

The overall picture doesn’t look bad from proper distance, but it’s obviously quite different from the CRTs when examined. You wouldn’t want to mimic these just by blurring everything extensively like composite with GTU-50 though, like I have seen some person do :grin:

1 Like

well if it 640x480 then that will make it pixel perfect, anyway it kinda reminds me of gba screen

1 Like

composite win again?

Counterpoint: Sony sold official S-video and RGB cables worldwide :stuck_out_tongue:

Around and around we go…

1 Like

To be fair, when I was a young teenager I loved these connectors as I said in this topic before. But now I see that the console manufacturers (not the game developers) were selling them to exploit the image sharpness obsession of the time, and frankly, they had a valid reason back then because getting a sharp and clean image wasn’t easy

1 Like

Other than computers, people were also being used to RGB from the arcades. I prefer some of the better ports because of added modes etc still today.

Rich people (and lunatics :laughing:) must have bought the Neo-Geo carts back then.

Something I remember seeing, but can’t find atm is Capcom having S-Video specific settings in one or a few ports? Related to some transparency trick effects of energy bars maybe?

1 Like

I believe sharpness/image clarity is one of those things that the average person just immediately recognizes as being superior. Our brains just want sharper images by default. It’s only after being educated on the benefits of composite video that people start to appreciate it.

1 Like