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…?
I think you can see some color differences but it’s like a signal related blurring thing and not like every color is desaturated- e.g., simply reducing the saturation setting in our shaders is not a good idea. I think that’s what I’m getting at.
It’s generally noticable how the early non-RGB system palettes look usually more muted compared to standard RGB (not necessarily a bad thing) of the time. Compare the early Atari systems or the C64 to the early PC 16 colors, arcade games etc. To a lesser degree it’s also my impression of NES to Master System, but that might be bs.
Another difference I noticed is how most Apple II emulators approximate the default composite colors versus the backwards compatible Apple II GS. The GS is a 16bit machine that can draw from a 4096 color RGB palette. If you load a up an Apple II game in e.g. MAME with it and compare to the 8bit machines, you’ll get
I think you’re correct that vibrancy is lost in the conversion process, YIQ isn’t as wide as RGB- but in practice it could be almost a negligible difference, depending on the signal processing. This kind of illustrates how good the signal processing got toward the end of the CRT era:
Interestingly, S-video looks a bit more saturated than RGB, and composite is about the same as RGB, with a very slight loss of detail and the typical artifacts. It makes me think there’s some kind of automatic correction applied that is bypassed when using RGB (on this TV). Or maybe just differently calibrated inputs…
RGB SCART, it’s PAL? (well, I mean in case of S-Video and composite since RGB dont has PAL/NTSC color differences)
anyway as I said before, composite in PAL is closer to RGB than NTSC to RGB
also it’s better to choose device that output ٌRGB natively (with no modding) like PS1 (better use original cables in all cases) since analog video is sensitive to any change (There is no error correction factor like in digital world)
from what I remember the color will not be the same in NTSC, so I end up choosing PAL 60 (whether in the game settings or via RGB to PAL converter which I mentioned earlier) to get better color with 80s SONY 27 inch tv that was multi system
I guess it depends on the TV. PAL corrects for phase errors, which is exactly what the Tint control was developed for. In practice, this was probably never set right, and over time things would drift but people wouldn’t adjust anything.
that not only the problem, PAL is YUV and NTSC is YIQ, YIQ is designed to give colors at lower bandwidth with manipulation and giving “I” more bandwidth than “Q” while in YUV both U and V have the same bandwidth, also YIQ didnt used in digital video like DVD, so even NTSC DVD was YUV but it will convert to YIQ before output to the TV if the device is set to NTSC (maybe it will not do this in component video output)
It’s designed for that as per the spec but in practice almost no one did this and they did actually dedicate equal bandwidth to both I and Q most of the time. It was actually cheaper to split it evenly (simpler decoding scheme).
In actuality, the bandwidth of the I channel is reduced to about that of the Q channel and each is phase-shifted an additional 33 degrees. This facilitates lower cost decoding circuitry in the receiver.
“In actuality, the bandwidth of the I channel is reduced to about that of the Q channel”
that seems worst than using standard YIQ band! and seems they kinda convert it to YUV with that “phase-shifted an additional 33 degrees” but with less bandwidth!
anyway, I have something you may find interesting! bad PAL signal affect saturation https://youtu.be/q8c-A05qay0?t=1153 maybe that’s why there’s a difference between RGB and composite (and even s-video) in saturation in some color ranges, most likely due to bad cables or some other fault with the TV or console or it’s some analog video limitation
It would be worse, yeah. TV manufacturers had to do a lot of weird things to make the picture look decent- without emulating the whole TV we’re kind of just eyeballing it with saturation, tint and hue controls. What I’ve seen is that manufacturers tended to over correct with saturation.
I’m still unable to find definitive evidence anywhere suggesting that NTSC composite color was inherently less saturated or vibrant compared to PAL, in practice. Everything I’m reading relates to phase/hue shifting, and in theory that is completely correctable with the tint control on an NTSC TV.
that is interesting, could be what’s going on with the Super Metroid example.
This is a good example from @hunterk. There’s a slight loss of brightness and a bit more saturation and contrast, maybe? Not washed out, though.
