What TV's do we all use?

[Carlos]

 

I use a 17" Grundig crt in the Cab, I have a 15" Beko CRT for for the ZX +2 and Atari 2600, they both have av and scart output and the colours are spot on.

[flatapex]

Modern stuff goes on a lg 32 inch lcd
Retro on a philips 14 inch tv/vcr combi. £7.50 off ebay

[64bitRuss]

50" Vizio 60hz. My Jaguar upconverted to 1080p is fantastic. Maybe I'll take a pic when I get the chance. I was going to take pics of my Jaguar and Lynx posters all framed anyway.

[zapiy]

Nice one i look forward to it..

[retromod]

the real problem is that modern TV sets do not have S-Video anymore. Mine is 2 years old (LG one) and has a SCART with only RGB, no S-Video at all. But VGA, Composite.

I found recently a good article describing the problematic:

If you expect good quality it is technically not possible to combine S-Video, Composite and RGB within one SCART connector as quality will be worse. So TV-makers uses two separate SCART connectors, one with S-Video and AV, the other with RGB and AV. But due to cost cuttings and design aspects currently one one SCART connector is built into a modern TV, and of course it uses RGB not S-Video. Yesterday I visited a big discounter here in germany and it seems there is no TV available (specially the 4K one) which offers S-Video. Most of them now uses an additional adapter as the SCART connector doesn't fit in housing anymore (because there are sooo thin). So you'll get one cable with a small connector on one side which seems to be vendor specific and an SCART adapter on the other side.

For my consoles I uses a plasma LG TV which is great but lacks the problem of brightness. The usability is down the toilete as seen on all TV sets, too slow, too complicated and all is set automatically which is a mess if you switch between channels. Even adding new channels mixes and moving channels from the predefined locations. Boring! But the upscaling is great and the picture quality is better than on other cheap TV sets.

So for gaming this TV is quite ok. I do not use the predefined parameters for gaming, movies etc. so these are always switched off. The automatic loudspeaker adjustment is disabled because if you switch between channels the audio signal drops dramatically until you can't hear anything even if you have max loudness set.
It is also a problem for my Stereo/Surround Mod for the consoles as during switch off the AD/DA noise in the background is interpreted as voices and loudness adjusted automatically which lead to a "waterfall" sound experience. The same for movies having silence at the beginning, the TV automatically increases loudness and you'll hear constant noise. The first sound effect (for example an explosion within the movie) throws you out of seat 

As the brightness is quite high on plasma any game played may result to headache after a while. The screen is too sharp. That's the reason I alter my Mod's to lower brightness, this also leads to less color-rolling and bleeding as seen on many other mods and even stock RGB models.  A typical sample is Xevious on the Atari 7800 which can't be played due to the color rolling in the back (even on RGB version of the Atari 7800). Same problem with Intellivision standard AV-mod, the screen has too many problems with brightness, noise in the picture and color-bleeding. That's the reason all the mods are presented on tube-based tv sets.... it fakes the quality!

As tube TV's are not available anymore and quite ugly to handle the only way is to alter current mods or find a way to connect old consoles to new TV-sets. I've tested several HDMI converters and finally all of them failed. The upscaling is the real problem as old consoles have lower resolution and upscaling means big blocks without antialiasing. If you have additional noise in the signal then you'll see a big soup of colors and pictures which looks like a blurry VGA monitor not set to it's recommended resolution.

I hope this will get better with my upcoming RGB mod which delivers far better quality so upscaling and pixel conversion is overall nicer. On the Atari Homecomputers I've noticed a problem with noise in the picture connected to a HDMI converter leads to single pixels even on flat backgrounds. So between the characters displayed on TV you'll notice a lot of pixels around - which looks very ugly and hard to read.

My fear is finally that with the upcoming new 4K standard and connectors the analog connectors will be reduces significantly. Currently it is very hard to get analog components for AV, S-Video and even RGB. All the video filter chips are out of production for example and the only available chips having AV, RGB etc. are really heavy beasts (with mainly digital functionality and analog export) with up to 200 pins and requirements for non-disclosure contracts from vendors. So the only way forward for retro hardware will be in long term to implement your own analog/digital converter on FPGA designs.

Modern consoles starting with PSone, PS2, gamecube, ps3 and WII have not problem as I feed them through SCART/RGB connectors if possible. I also noticed a big difference in quality if I feed an AV signal through the dedicated connectors or via SCART adapter. the SCART adapter AV signal seems to be handled by another logic within the TV leading to much brighter and sharper output. That's the reason I deliver an AV2SCART adapter with my mods.

[guest5130]

I have one of these (not my own photo - just nicked off Google!)



Sony Wega Trintron KV-28HX15U 28" CRT. Think I paid £40 for this from a local ebay pick-up and that included the nifty matching stand (sadly binned due to not needing it) and a cheap freeview box (also binned). Really good quality as you'd expect from a Trinitron and perfect for the retro machines.

The only downside is the that it's huge and very heavy! Lugging this up a flight of stairs during a heatwave was not fun...

[64bitRuss]

Here's my rig. I'm done with CRT, using my upconvertor the picture quality has never been better.

[Cryptic33]

Here's my rig. I'm done with CRT, using my upconvertor the picture quality has never been better.

Wow, that is cool