Jeroen wrote:
Right, but the nes doesn't natively output S-video, so you wouldn't actually get any improvements over composite if you used a converter.
That's completely missing the point. You even mention this afterwards:
Quote:
That being said, composite -> s-video converters often have something called a "comb filter", something which your tv might lack, which takes out some of the noise.
There are more different ways to separate out the brightness from the color signals than you can shake a stick at.
Every NTSC decoder does this differently.
A "comb filter" is nothing more, and nothing less, than assuming that the color on one scanline is roughly the same as the colors on the scanlines above and below. Sometimes this is a safe assumption. Sometimes it is not. For consoles with large areas of the same color (e.g. 2600), or gradual gradients (N64 and better?), it's a safe assumption.
For consoles with limited master palettes and new colors every scanline (SMS, NES, maybe others?), it's almost certainly not a safe assumption.
A "3d" comb filter adds the assumption that, after the TV detects specific motions in the video, that it can assume that the colors in the near future and past are also consistent. This usually adds unacceptable lag for gaming.
The TV is using a different method to separate out color from brightness than the XRGB mini. Hence the perceived better results. There isn't a single optimal NTSC decoder that will give desirable results for all inputs.
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One gotcha for using full component video, instead of S-video or composite, is that artists working with the NES's limitations took advantage of its limited color bandwidth. (Only a change in color every two pixels can be encoded: the color portion of anything that changes more often will be blurred)