TV Worries

[Lego]

Now I live with two younger brothers, so usually it's a fight for the PS2. The TV we use for the PS2(and other consoles) is a no thrills older TV that has S-Video as its highest connection. It plays fine, and I have no problem with it. But I do have a host of questions. Sometimes while playing games like Metal Gear Solid 3, and one or two others, I'll notice that I get a little black area on the upper left and right, almost like the TV is squeezing the image. I went through countless settings, and everything is set to the right settings(standard 4:3) TV, but nothing seems to work.

My hunch is that it's based on how we're connecting the PS2 to the TV. It's from some old Mad Catz antenna connector thing, which I'm pretty sure is the problem. I've eyed a set of PS2 S-Video cables at Circuit City, and will probably go pick those up later today. But my question is, what could be causing this? I'm interested in others opinions as well as my own.

I've always wanted to play games on my two year old 27", but I'm deadly afraid of my Gamecube or PS2 ruining my TV like it seemingly is doing to our current one. Now factor in that if I would plug in the console to the television in my room, it would be through component cables, so I guess I wouldn't have to worry to much. But then you have the burn in issue heh.

Has anyone heard or seen this happen before? I'm stumped. I was even thinking of buying a small 15"-20" HD TV just for games.

[naiera]

Connecting a console to a TV will NOT ruin it.

[Lego]

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Naiera said:
Connecting a console to a TV will NOT ruin it.

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Yeh, I don't know what the hell is going on heh. I think it could be the picture tube itself as we've had another TV that had this permanent black bars on its sides. I didn't and still don't know what went wrong(I'm betting on that TV dieing though), so I figured that I would ask here. I don't want the other TV to turn out like that or even if I tried it on my TV.

[Swordfish_II]

I've noticed on a quite a few games what appears to be overscan areas around the edges of the picture.

[SilverLuz]

Your console is not ruining your TV, and you can safely connect it to the newer one. My best guess as to what is going on is that your older TV has some geometry issues that you only notice under the right conditions. It's probably squeezing all images a bit at the top, and it may have always been this way. But the distortion is likely fairly minor, so you'd never notice in most cases. Most of the time, the image actually extends 2-3% beyond the edge of your screen - but some games may choose to just draw black bars in this overscan area, since they figure you'll never see it and it saves some rendering time. The vast majority of CRTs have some kind of geometry issues (unless they've been calibrated) - so it's just a question of whether they're bad enough for you to notice. New cables won't help, but a new TV might /images/graemlins/sdsmiley.gif

[Lego]

[ QUOTE ]
SilverLuz said:
Your console is not ruining your TV, and you can safely connect it to the newer one. My best guess as to what is going on is that your older TV has some geometry issues that you only notice under the right conditions. It's probably squeezing all images a bit at the top, and it may have always been this way. But the distortion is likely fairly minor, so you'd never notice in most cases. Most of the time, the image actually extends 2-3% beyond the edge of your screen - but some games may choose to just draw black bars in this overscan area, since they figure you'll never see it and it saves some rendering time. The vast majority of CRTs have some kind of geometry issues (unless they've been calibrated) - so it's just a question of whether they're bad enough for you to notice. New cables won't help, but a new TV might /images/graemlins/sdsmiley.gif

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Ah, thanks Silver. As for that new TV, sure, send it over /images/graemlins/sdsmiley.gif. I'll probably connect my Gamecube to my 27" with component cables once I get Twilight Princess heh. I'm still open to the possibility of using my 930B to play games, instead of going out and buying a new monitor.

[Ty]

Black area as in no picture information is being displayed? This is rather typical since the PS2 is set up to deliberately underscan it's output, by quite a bit actually. I've adjusted overscan via service menu in my own tv and when I play my PS2 I get more than an inch of underscan on all sides. All tvs overscan to some extend unless they're HD sets with a dot by dot option, and sometimes it varies a bit from side to side. The overscan on your set is probably just about the same as the underscan from the PS2, only in that corner it's a bit less allowing the underscanning to be visible.

[ColoradoJim]

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Xcalibur said:
This is rather typical since the PS2 is set up to deliberately underscan it's output, by quite a bit actually. I've adjusted overscan via service menu in my own tv and when I play my PS2 I get more than an inch of underscan on all sides.

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I wasn't aware that the PS2 was set up for underscanning on purpose, but then again there were some games that allowed you to move and resize the gameplay area in the settings. Now if only DVD players had an underscan menu option as standard as I hate to miss any of the picture and I know that quite a few DVD players overscan as well. Because of this, even adjusting the TV to remove the overscan won't show all of the picture with certain DVD players.