by SonicSilicon » May 16, 2001 @ 11:01am
Plus you get more resolution. On composite (the RCA connector) you can get about 540 vertical lines [i.e. horizontal resolution] (forgive me if I'm getting this wrong, my NTSC knowledge is a bit hazy.) On Y/C (S-Video) you get around 720. Sometimes you'll also get an increase in horizontal lines [,vertical resolution,] but usually that's more dependant on the source of the video.<br><br>As stated before, the main purpose is to prevent color bleed / smearing. That's when you get "flanges" or "fingers" of color where it doesn't belong, most often red. S-Video also decreases the ammount of dot-crawl (a "marching-ants"-like effect) around edges of sharp contrast in color or brightness. Lastly it increases color accuracy (as color is defines as how far a hue is away from green either clockwise or conter-clockwise on a color wheel.)<br><br>I have to say tat I persoanlly couldn't stand watching plain old composite video if Y/C (Luminance/Chrominance) is available. As Moose said, it isn't VGA, or even composite video. It is, however, substantionally cheaper than most other higher quality video cabling. Just yesterday I was poking around Electronic Boutique's brink-n-mortar store at the mall and saw a S-Video and RCA Stereo breakout cable for the Playstations (yes, it works on all of them) for just $10 (it was made by Interact.) (Great, now I'm really tempted to buy a PSone...)