Discussion Does composite video have a worse reputation than it deserves?

[Subnats]

So a bit of backstory to this. Recently the PC CRT that was my main display for both my modern and retro gaming died. I was happy enough to just go ahead and replace it with an LCD but for the sake of still having the option to play retro games on a CRT I hooked up my old "retro" setup. That being essentially just a modded Wii running emulators. Now the CRT TV I'm using doesn't support component and I don't have a scart cable yet so for now I'm stuck using composite which is by far the worst output option available. But I don't know if I just remember composite to be worse than it is or the Wii just has amazing video quality but this honestly looks great.



Like obviously it isn't the sharpest thing in the world and anything that displays in 480i (like actual Wii/Gamecube games) look pretty blurry but it's also far from looking bad. Honestly if I hadn't already orded it, I probably wouldn't even bother getting a scart cable, I'm more than happy with the image quality as it is.

 

[Robin64]

Honestly, your up-close pics look better than a lot of emulator shaders to me.

 

[Dopply]

It's fine and how the majority of people watched movies and played games in the 1990s-2000s. When retro gaming began its renaissance in 2014 or so, the only people truly invested at that point were hardcore videophiles who insisted on the absolute best. Thus, a lot of the tenants we know today 'SCART RGB is the best', 'composite was always terrible' were spread and continue to persist.

Objectively it's worse quality than S-Video, RGB, or other high quality signals. But subjectively? Most people are not going to care. Playing an old game on an old TV is usually good enough.

I'm happy RetroRGB and others are setting the record straight and making retro gaming more inclusive to others. I'm ready for the persistent elitism in the space to die off.

 

[Mondo]

S-Video and RGB are objectively better, but personally the difference there only really matters for me when it comes to upscalers. On CRTs, I'd be hard pressed to really tell the difference unless I tried to specifically look for video noise to tell them apart.

 

[Krvavi Abadas]

Composite is only particularly good in the case of games that use it's color blending to make effects, for example, early DOS games would use it to get a proper color palette out of basic CGA graphics.

Otherwise it looks far too blurry on a modern display, and depending on the console. All you really need to get the best signal could just be buying the right cable. Even consoles as old as the SEGA Master System can be like this.

 

[TurtleRock]

Pixel blending from composite video was definitely an artistic choice that developers took advantage of. That being said, I think that S-Video is a lot better at giving you the blended look while also being a lot clearer than composite. It's a perfect middle ground and looks fantastic on a CRT TV. I'll go with s-video over composite if I have the option.

 

[Clix]

I used S Video a lot as a kid until I got my GameCube and upgraded to component as soon as I could.

But even composite looked good on my crt. I didn’t have a top of the line tv as a kid but we had a quality one and it looked great.

Which is my issue with emulator shaders. The CRT effect is either a blurry mess that looks like RF or when they do scanlines it looks way to sharp.

A quality CRT with composite or s video especially gave you the softness of CRT with some scanlines that didn’t yell at you “look at these scanlines” like I see a lot of people assume CRTs looked like back in the day.

 

[Twinsen]

The blurryness was too much for me. I remember the component cable really being a gamechanger. Like major improvement visually. So much more clearer. But obviously a blurry image is gonna wash out the pixelated look which has its benefits.

 

[Reinhard Schneider]

I blame composite's current reputation on channels like My Life in Gaming and RetroRGB

Please don't misunderstand me, i actually follow them, enjoy their content and they were my guide to bring my Cube and PS2 back from the dead, but they treat composite as if it were a spawn from hell, when developers back in the day used composite as the base signal to design their games AND the art was very dependent on it

These are, possibly, my favorite examples about how composite on a CRT contributed to a game's graphics

I grew up playing on CRTs on composite, and that shit was magic, the way colors bled and blend together made the games almost unrecognizable when i started using rgb scart cables (and don't get me started on emulation!)

Now, it is true that composite only worked it magic on CRTs, if you use it on modern panels all you get is pixel crawling, rainbowing and a very blurry and uncomfortable image. For flat screens (TFT, LCD, LED, OLED, whatever) an RGB cable is the bare minimum.

But back then the choice was between the intended graphics and cleaner art but taking a peek at what's behind the scenes.

 

[Tangerine_Cookie]

I used an RF Switch basically up to the N64 era. And yes, it was blurry and had RF artifacts, but it was perfectly playable. Composite however struck a good balance of using CRTs soft edges to smooth out graphics, and not having as many artifacts, that was pretty neat.

Younger me definitely got a kick out of the upgrades from RF to composite, from composite to RGB, and RGB to component.

 

[Mazzle]

Composite is shit in regards to modern TVs and trying to capture things.
S-Video was the biggest step in better picture clarity and using proper RGB on an PVM is just fantastic, but Composite is
enough and the standard way so play old shit on an old consumer CRT.
Games were designed with CRTs in mind. See two posts above.

But most people don't have a CRT anymore, or don't wanna have one, which leads us to using RGB and proper upscalers
if you want a good image on your huge TV and not 150ms and more latency.