Do you see dithering when you use S-video?

[Wavelflack]

I'm curious about this. I have a Philips HDTV CRT, and I have several systems hooked up to it via s-video. It makes sense that I would see dithered colors on older systems (n64, etc.) due to the increased clarity of the output. What surprises me is that I see what appears to be dithered colors in Dramcast and even Gamecube games.

Is this actually the case? I can't see any reason why those two systems would need any sort of tricks to simulate color depth. But I'm not sure about this..

My question is this: Are there indeed "late gen" games that still display dithered colors, and s-video is just clean enough to show it for what it is? Or is there perhaps some sort of issue with the TV itself, maybe a glitch in the signal processing areas?

Tell me if you have experienced this with systems hooked up via s-video. And for those who may not understand what I mean by "dithered colors", it essentially looks like a checkerboard.

[Cambot]

I have never seen dither. Neither hither nor thither.

[Pete Rittwage]

I had a friend who bought an HDTV and used a cheap component cable on his XBOX. The picture looked bad and appeared dithered. Upgraded to the 'Monster' version and it was like a different system, clear as a bell.

I am not a proponent of expensive cables and was very skeptical, but in this case it made a difference. I guess his original cable could have been defective in some way.

Doesn't apply to S-VIDEO connections, but on topic somewhat.

[Ponyone]

Not sure if this has anything to do with anything, but awhile back I bought an s-video cable for my xbox (with 3 different extensions for xbox,ps2,and gamecube)

I had it hooked up to both my xbox and gamecube. I was watching movies on my xbox and noticed the colors and picture to be dark and 'dithered'

I thought I had a broken cable..turns out you can only stick it in one machine at a time, even if the other one is not on.

It turned out to be one of those cases where I tried all difficult paths to fix, and it was as simple as unplugging the gc's input.

[c0ldb33r]

Here's something I encountered last night...

I had my gamecube plugged into a cheap-ass no name brand (Viero or something) HDTV using composite (note - composite, not component) cables. The picture looked like hell.

I was playing mariokart, and when the image stayed still for any period of time (for instance, I was driving on a straightaway for a few seconds and the rear driver wasn't moving), the non-moving aspects looked all shitty. The rear driver had all these horizontal lines that would protrude out of him for about a centimeter or so.

It looked like when I plug it into the TV tuner on my PC (which is pretty-low end). I was shocked how crappy it looked. It looks fine on my 27" CRT.

The owner of the TV said it's probably because we were plugging a low quality source into a high quality TV. I think it's probably just a shitty TV.

What do you guys think?