Scart to HDMI converters

[Nick1984]

1. What's the cheapest model around?
2. Do 'upscalers' upscale Saturn games?

[mick_aka]

I can say with direct experience and some authority that connecting it directly using the SCART on your HDTV and letting your TV upscale it is the best picture you will get from your Saturn on an HDTV.

Running though a converter or upscaler (and I own a few) will do one or more of the following:

Cause image lag/delay,
Wash out the colours,
Blur the image,
Cause motion blur.

I also had problems with one of the cheaper converters where it overheated and caused distortion on the screen.

[Nick1984]

Ah, the new lounge TV is one of those ultra-slim LED sets which has 4xHDMI, 1xPC and an RF.

Just a thought, with new TVs coming out that only have digital (Freeview) tuners, how would you get old RF consoles like NES/MegaDrive to work seeing as you can't select a tuner channel other than Freeview?

[mick_aka]

Are you sure your TV has no SCART sockets? they're still pretty standard on every TV I've seen, even the demo BLD and 3D TVs I've looked at!

Well the NES has composite outputs as standard so no need for RF there, and the MegaDrive outputs full RGB so a SCART lead can be used, or indeed composite & s-video.

The only consoles you're going to find that are RF only are Atari 2600 era machines.

[Nick1984]

Cheers for the info, yeah it wasn't something I really took into consideration when buying it and it's a bit silly looking back now.

My bedroom TV's pretty good with Saturn, it's a 28" LCD Samsung (720p) and Saturn games look great through scart surprisingly.

[Yart]

Well, if RGB SCART is just Analog RGB, and PC (VGA) is just Analog RGB...

Couldn't you just find a way to plug the RGB SCART into the VGA slot?

[Nick1984]

Never thought of that, I've seen some RGB-VGA adaptors around but just assumed the HDMI ones would produce better quality.

[bison2uk]

Aug 26, 2010 10:40:18 GMT Nick1984 said:

Never thought of that, I've seen some RGB-VGA adaptors around but just assumed the HDMI ones would produce better quality.

Take that with a pinch of salt. I have my xbox 360 hooked via VGA cable on my hdtv and the picture compared to hdmi has a big difference. But sometimes it depends on your hdtv aswell.

[buckoa51]

Aug 25, 2010 18:52:17 GMT mick_aka said:

I can say with direct experience and some authority that connecting it directly using the SCART on your HDTV and letting your TV upscale it is the best picture you will get from your Saturn on an HDTV.

That is disappointing, seeing as retro consoles on HDTV's look pretty awful, especially 1080P sets. Surely the XRGB3 is the best way to connect things to a HDTV? - See retrogaming.hazard-city.de/

[Aydan]

I always found a simple RGB scart into my HD looked great.

Although I'd turn the sharpness setting down to 0 so it looks more smooth like a CRT screen.

[buckoa51]

Sharpness should be down anyway, since you're just adding crap to the picture that should not be there.

I'm buying an X-RGB3 to go with my next TV, I'll post before and after pictures then. The DVDO Edge is also a good scaler for videogames according to the page I posted.

[Aydan]

well if u'r playing HD games/movies you want sharpness at 50% to even 100% imo. having sharpness off on hd games looks real awful. only on old retro consoles does it look good since it lowers the whole pixelation (somewhat...)

[Kibbles]

Aug 26, 2010 16:04:12 GMT Aydan said:

well if u'r playing HD games/movies you want sharpness at 50% to even 100% imo. having sharpness off on hd games looks real awful. only on old retro consoles does it look good since it lowers the whole pixelation (somewhat...)

You seem to misunderstand how sharpness works.

All it does is to increase 'sharpness' is darken the pixels around light image details and lighten the pixels around dark image details.


50% is understandable as some sets actually use 50% as a zero value, meaning that all values under 50% are actually a 'blur' setting.

However:-
You should not ever put it at 100% if you are interested in image quality, since at this level you observe what is called the 'Halo-ing' , where your TV essentially just draws a very visible line around every detail.

*Edit*
Another thing worthy of mention is that most processors inside TVs etc seem to sharpen the image before they upscale it rather than afterwards, so any visible halo-ing is many times worse on a low-res signal than a high res one as the halo-ing itself is being upscaled.

[Aydan]

Aha. That explains the why 50% on mine looks great on hd. Still, I set it to 0% for saturn and other older games since it's like a fake filtering effect and smoothens things out nicely.

Each to their own.

[buckoa51]

The sharpness control was actually added to NTSC sets way back when colour TV first came on the scene. It was designed to compensate for loss of colour information in early colour decoders. Why it's still around on HD sets is anyone's guess.

What Dixosaurus said about the middle setting equating to off on some sets is correct, In fact my set does this and like you I've experimented turning it down past 50% to soften the picture and eliminate some of the jaggies on retrogames.

If you use a test pattern and turn up the sharpness, you'll see the edges become more pronounced around the test pattern. You're effectively adding crap to the picture that should not be there. It's your TV you do whatever you want, but I highly recommend using something like the Digital Video Essentials - HD Basics Blu-ray disc to properly calibrate your set.

Adding again to what Dix said, the upscalers in most HDTV's are not the greatest available and also are designed for upscaling DVD and/or SDTV resolutions and NOT the typical 240p output of consoles like the Saturn. Also, as mick_aka has found, many of the external upscalers/converters are designed for DVD/TV and NOT retrogaming and so suffer from lag or simply don't work well.

It depends how picky you are and how much you are willing to spend, certainly the picture quality isn't going to be unbearable by just hooking up a SCART cable directly to a HDTV, but see the link I posted for some examples of how it can be improved.