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c/dusty-consoles•young.ryanyoung.ryan•10d agoProlific Poster

Changed my mind about component cables for PS2 after seeing a comparison.

I always thought composite was fine for PS2 games, but a guy at a local retro meetup in Austin showed me his setup with Monster component cables on Gran Turismo 4. The difference in clarity on the car details and track textures was night and day, even on my old 720p LCD. Now I'm hunting for a cheap set on eBay, anyone got a lead on a brand that works well without costing $50?
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3 Comments
david703
david70310d ago
Honestly I've been down that road and went back to composite on my CRT. Yeah component is sharper but it makes the jaggies way more obvious on PS2 games that weren't built for it. Seems like you're just trading one problem for another.
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fiona_carr26
fiona_carr2610d ago
Follow that thought a bit further. Composite on a CRT is basically doing the anti-aliasing for you without asking. The signal's naturally soft so it hides all those shimmering edges and flickering polygons that really stand out with component. Plus the colors bleed in a way that actually makes older game art look more blended and intentional. Component just lays those jaggies bare, especially on 3D games from that era where they used dithering and weird texture filtering. You end up noticing the hardware limitations way more when everything's crisp but the geometry is still PS2 jagged. It's like watching a 240p video on a 4K screen, sometimes the blur is actually the feature.
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scott.olivia
scott.olivia9d ago
Wait, are you saying the jaggies actually look worse because the signal is too clean? I never thought of it that way but yeah that makes total sense. Like in Gran Turismo 4, the car reflections look all pixelated and shimmering with component because the sharpness just highlights how rough the PS2's polygon count actually was. Composite sort of smooths over all that by accident, same way old games on a CRT have that built-in blur that masks the low resolution. It's a weird trade-off where the cleaner picture actually reveals more flaws instead of hiding them lol.
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