My quest for an S-video TV and a mini Arcade TV primer


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Posted by RandyT on 16, 2001 at 9:49 AM:

I finally decided to go the S-Video TV route for my cabinet, and after looking for the best quality to price ratio, I finally settled on the 27" Sanyo DS27800 for $289 at Walmart. Coupled with an ATI Rage Fury card, this unit delivered a large and VERY nice looking image.

I have also learned a few things about what to look for in a TV slated for Arcade cabinet use.

1: S-Video - This is a no brainer. S-video gives a MUCH cleaner picture with greatly reduced color bleed.

2: COMB FILTER - Not all S-video capable TV's have these circuits built in, but they are A MUST if you plan to use the TV with a computer output. These circuits are designed to reduce or eliminate stray pixels and dot crawl (the funny movement you see on the edges of adjacent objects of two different colors.)
However, not all comb filters are created equal. I checked out the Panasonic and Sharp units and there was still noticable crawl. The Sanyo was virtually rock solid. NOTE: The ATI card has settings for reducing the same type of artifacts, but it does it at the cost of vertical resolution. Much better results were achieved by leaving the card's settings at minimum artifact removal and letting the TV's circuitry do the work.

3: Lines of Horizontal Resolution - General rule of thumb is "more is better". The best explantion of what this spec describes is this: Imagine having 1000 white vertical lines, 1 pixel wide, each seperated by a dark line 1 pixel wide, all side by side on your screen. The number of lines that you can actually count (ie. that aren't blurred together with an adjacent line) is the number of "lines of horizontal resolution". The Sanyo has 600 lines of horizontal resolution, which is plenty for an arcade machine.

I still need to take the TV apart and design some custom mounts to fit it in my cabinet, but in my initial "outside of the cabinet" testing, I found the Sanyo to be a real gem. But as always, YMMV :)

RandyT




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