Printable View
Light gun issues aside, it seems to me LCD tv's really don't do justice to Genesis games...anybody agree? The picture always looks really really grainy and washed out and I think my Emerson CRT actually makes the games look really good. Now, with Dreamcast and more modern systems I think the LCD has a bit of an edge. Anybody agree, disagree?
LCD looks grainy even when it comes to normal TV. I can't believe people trade down picture quality to get a flat TV. I recently bought a 29" Philips 29PT5408, which isn't LCD or flat, but I seriously don't think the picture quality can be any better for my Mega Drive games.
I use an Electrohome-brand 27" CRT TV, and it makes the Genesis seem grainy, but only if I'm using a Model 2 or 3 on it. The Model 1 is the least grainy, the Model 2 with the KA2195D encoder the worst. What I find odd, though, is that the video looks MORE grainy through Composite than RF. Someone explain that to me? Isn't it supposed to be less grainy through Composite? Should you modify the unit for S-Video(my TV has no SCART inputs), it looks really sharp on my TV.
It seems to me that any TV larger than 20 inches provides a lesser visual experience with 16-bit and lower games. Even some of my Saturn and PS1 games look better on a smaller screen. I took a Genesis to a friend's house to play so old style football and on his mega screen (60 inch?) it looked horrible and the menus were almost unreadable.
The phenomenon is similar to taking a photo that looks great at 640x480 and blowing it up to twice its size. It gets pixilated and generally crappy looking.
I use a 32" Sony Wega CRT (standard def). Genesis, SNES, Neo Geo, NES, any 32-bit or lesser system. It all looks fantastic on it.
Mitsubishi Megaviews seemed like the holy grail as far as video game monitors go, at least when I was looking into the best possible TV for games around 2000. Problem is they're big and heavy, though the price on them has fallen quite a bit.
Some people bash LCDs, but I love mine. It by far has the best picture I've had when playing games. The only issue with the sharper image is that games which exploited the limitations of older technology (such as the water line in Sonic) are noticeable thanks to the lack of haze.
I don't like playing Sega CD on a plasma screen TV, especially games like Lethal Enforcers, because I can't use the gun.
what you are referring to is actually just a glitch/flaw/yuckiness pertaining to the video output. The toploader NES also had a similar problem only it simply had vertical striping rather than hazy pixels. Part of that may have been because they figured everyone was using RF and you can barely tell, so why not cut costs and use a cheaper/lower quality output. One thing for sure though, LCD does make older systems look crappy, but thats because they were designed and programmed to work on CRT TVs and took advantage of the way those TVs display images. Without any emulator-style filters, the games tend to look very blocky/grainy and generally just kinda bad. I'm hoping to buy a relatively large CRT TV just for vintage games and then have another LCD/Plasma for newer hi-def games. Heck, even PS3 and XBOX 360 can look like crap on hi-def if you don't know exactly how to set it up.Quote:
Originally Posted by Ace
4:3 Flat or Half-Flat CRT, or some ultr@ fast LCD... LCD TVs aren't fast enough for games, only PC monitors are, at least for now.... the diagonal of the screen should be above 21" for maximum detail using composhit and other methods generally used outside Europe... the smaller the screen the more you need RGB for anything pleasing to the eye...
Blocky/Grainy look is what I want, so use of RGB and big screen will provide it.
I'd say pretty much any CRT TV will do.
Because I regularly use a 50'in Plasma to do pretty much everything and Mega Drive games look... really bad through the composite cables. Why didn't Australia get much SCART >.>'
As said before, LCD TVs and stuff look really bad. I had my NES hooked up to one (pretty new one, 19 inch or so) for a while because I didn't have a choice and it looked like a freakin' JPEG image the whole time, with that ugly grainy look. Also the response time was kinda slow so if your player moved against a dark background you would see a little trail behind them. VERY annoying.
I have my most used systems (NES, Genesis, TurboGrafx-16, and Wii) hooked up to a little 11 inch Sony Trinitron CRT TV. The picture is pretty good except it seems like the image isn't completely there. Sort of like playing a NES game on a DS homebrew emulator and squishing it to fit the screen, except very less severe. As in just on the verge of being noticeable. All in all, though, very usable and convenient for me because it's the only TV that'll fit in my room.
My other systems (SNES, N64, Gamecube) are hooked up to a roughly 30 inch CRT TV of some brand I can't remember (might be Magnavox). I also used it for my other consoles before I got that smaller TV in my room. The picture is phenomenal, really. There's lots of color and you can make out all the pixels nice and clearly even on composite. It's really my favorite gaming TV, but I'm still mostly using the smaller one just because of convenience and the fact that there's no heat in the basement in the winter and no AC in the summer.
I had a Philips which was AWESOME in composite, but even better in component when I started to play my retro systems in component video, but for some reason, the geometry was fucked up.
Saturn in S-video looked good for the longest time, then I played some S3&K on the Genesis with Component video, then went back to Saturn with S-video and it looked awful.
I'd recommend a 27" Sony Trinitron, or Wega. The only downfall though is dot-crawl with images in red, but overall the picture quality is fantastic. I'm hoping to get my 27" Trinitron in for repairs (VPU went on the blink) so that I can play light gun games my HD sets won't play.
I use a ~20" RCA XL100 from like the early to mid 80s that someone just threw out! I picked it up, plugged it in and it works GREAT! The picture is actually really good! It had no coaxial RF input, only the 4 screws for UHF/VHF so I had to find an adapter to use it. I found one of those for free.... on the back of an old Sansui stereo receiver I had!
I love my Philips, but I think I need to look for a newer one as these 10+ years are starting to show up.