RGB Monitors

[halbert]

Hi all. I have a question about RGB monitors. It seems that everyone wants one, but I'm not sure why. I assume it's because they are higher-res than TV's? I have played games on an Amiga RGB monitor for a long time, and it's never really seemed much different to me than a TV. Anybody care to enlighten me?

[christianscott27]

well in my case i have an RGB monitor but alas i do not have the special cables to take full advantage of it. so i'm just using the A/V cables which of course is not RGB. in nutshell RGB means a cleaner picture by way of seperate red, green, blue signals going to to the gun in the monitor, rather then sending them all together like A/V does. well thats my understanding of it anyways. think of the nice clean picture on an arcade game, thats RGB.

[Ze_ro]

The basic gyst of video standards is that internally, your console generates signals for red, green, blue, left and right audio, and vertical and horizontal sync. If you're using S-Video, composite, or RF, then these are getting combined in some form or another. The more you combine things, the worse the picture ends up being. If you hook up in RGB, you don't combine ANY of the signals, so you therefor get pretty much the best picture you can get (ignoring transmission line effects, interference and such, you should ideally get a "perfect" picture).

Stuff like composite and S-Video are done fairly well though, and arrange things so that the quality you lose in the video is actually done in just the right way so your eyes can tolerate the imperfections better. They're not bad for most games. In fact, I never really cared too much about getting anything better than composite until I hooked my Jaguar up in RGB, and the picture quality was noticably improved. Have you ever tried using a TV-out card and using your computer for actual work on a TV screen? You should try it some time.

Incidentally, I have an Amiga hooked up downstairs using composite, and occaisionally I have to bring it upstairs where I hook up via RGB. The picture in RGB is so crisp that it makes composite look like someone smeared vaseline on the monitor. Of course, reading 80 column computer text is a lot different from blasting Space Invaders, but you get the idea.

--Zero

[halbert]

Thanks for the responses. I guess I have not been using RGB after all . I will see about getting some of the correct cables.

[davidleeroth]

You chose well, my son.

Basically TV is a RGB monitor with built-in tuner. RGB has nothing to do with resolution.

I've been using RGB since Sega enlightened me with Mega Drive. Nowadays the only console I play with composite is my NES where RGB mod is a bit troublesome and really not so great anyway IMO.
Can't recommend RGB enough.

[anagrama]

Indeedy It's nice and easy for us Europeans since pretty much all TVs over here will accept an RGB input. All my main systems run in 60Hz RGB and are a wonder to behold