1080i and 720p colour question

[Vegeta]

Is it normal for 1080i to appear less colourful than 480i/480p and 720p to appear more blurry than 480p and less colourful too?

[HRGS]

No, it is not.
Is your component cable original from Sony itself?
And check if its connectors are gold plated.

[dlanor]

Is it normal for 1080i to appear less colourful than 480i/480p and 720p to appear more blurry than 480p and less colourful too?

It is not normal in itself, but it does not necessarily indicate any error in either the hardware or the software, as some such effects may be due to the displayed material itself.

If, for example, you have a very low resolution picture or video that you want to display in a very high resolution screen, filling that screen entirely, then the picture will have to be rescaled by some large factor. For a media player to do that in realtime is a very demanding job, and total resampling and filtering by the best algorithms (eg: lanczos3) is not something that a PS2 media player can afford to do. So the result may then seem less pleasing to the eye than if you were using a lower screen resolution, and thus a smaller scale factor.

But if the material displayed is originally made for 720p format, and displays well as such on other equipment without any scaling, then any blurriness or loss of colour when playing it in 720p with the PS2 does indicate some error in either hardware or software used for the rendition.

As has already been suggested, the cable quality does matter, as the pixel rate of video is high enough to be quite sensitive to such things as cable impedance, and cable termination in the equipment.

I have seen some cables that provide a branching set of cables intended for different console types at the 'source' end of the main cable, and those must be extra prone to such problems, as each of the unused cable branches (those with connectors for Wii, XBox, etc) constitutes a kind of unterrminated 'stub antenna' which acts as a frequency dependent filter for the signals passing from the console connector in use to the connectors at the TV end of the cable.

Such 'stub antenna' filters may not only block some frequencies but may even boost some others, and the overall effect may be one of of both increased blurriness and artifacts depending on horizontal pixel-patterns. (Because different pixel-patterns represent effective frequency variations, differently affected by the 'stub antenna' filters.)

This is one of the reasons why Sony cables are always superior to that type of cable, since the Sony cable only has the playstation connector at the source end, and the cable itself is optimized for such use. I use one of these Sony cables myself to connect my v15 PSTwo with my widescreen LCD TV, and this works quite well for me.

Oh, I almost forgot to state the reason why the effects of a bad cable get worse with higher resolutions. That reason is of course that a higher resolution always implies a higher pixel rate, and this means that the effective frequency of each pixel-pattern is also higher, and those 'stub antenna' effects always get more pronounced for a higher frequency range.

And I should also mention that some similar effects, with similar frequency filtering, can also occur with bad cables that do not have the split branches I mentioned, as filtering effects of another kind will inevitably occur for the kind of cable where all the separate signals are crammed together in a thin cable with inadequate shielding between its separate leads. Some types of inadequate shielding may even worsen the problem compared to no shield at all, due to the shield working as a filter capacitor.

Btw: On another note, I have to advise against using the 1080i resolution of SMS, as the program seems unable to keep sound and video well synchronized at that resolution. So currently I use the 720p resolution instead which works very well. The only problem with it was one related to the picture centering, as lowering he picture tends to make the bottom lines 'tear' or even add overlayed garbage at the bottom. So for best results I have to leave a small black border at the bottom of the screen.

Best regards: dlanor

[Vegeta]

Thanks for the detailed reply dlanor!

A friend of mine has a set of Monster Gamelink component cables for his PS3 (which work on PS2) which he doesn't use anymore due to using HDMI now so they are mine for the taking

These cables are very very good, especially the build quality but overpriced if purchased from the store.

I will report back on the results once I have the cable as I personally believe the cable is at fault as I had to replace a 3rd party Xbox1 component cable a long time ago due to ghosting in 720p/1080i with the official cable.

I just never really noticed any problems with the 3rd party component cable on PS2 due to mostly using it for 480i/480p resolutions.

[Vegeta]

Got the Monster cable today and 480i/480p looks the same as the old cable but there is a massive difference in 720p/1080i modes as they look brighter, less pixelated and more colourful.

[dlanor]

Got the Monster cable today and 480i/480p looks the same as the old cable but there is a massive difference in 720p/1080i modes as they look brighter, less pixelated and more colourful.

That is quite natural, since the latter modes produce much higher pixel rates than the 480x ones. This means that the cable must handle much higher overtones of the pixel-pattern signals in order to avoid frequency dependent phase-shift between the three colour components, as well as frequency dependent attenuation. This is where most cheap cables can't measure up, even if they seem to work perfectly well for the lower resolutions.

Best regards: dlanor