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[fahrenheit]

Its really a bit of both. I have the Joytech SCART cable aswell as another third-party SCART cable and I also have PS2 and Gamecube - all SCART. The Joytech cable is fairly ordinary, make sure that the S-Video cable isn't hooked up at the sametime, even if the device is off. I have one Xbox with a Conexant video chip and one with the Focus chip, and the Conexant is superior. The Focus played hell with my Loewe TV and had huge horizontal colourbands moving up and down the screen. The only solution I found was to get into my TV's service menu and alter the RGB horizontal position.
Another thing that may clean the image up a bit is to eliminate any of the SCART pins that may cause interference. Like the Red, Green and Blue return signals and pin 8 which controls automatic widescreen mode switching.

If you want to eliminate some pins tell me and I'll explain what to cut.

[schmuck]

I havent open mine yet so i dont know what tvchip i have. Only thing i know is that i have version 1.1 with a samsung drive. I dont think i have any colorbanding..the main problem as i see it is that the picture isnt as sharp as it should be.

QUOTE

If you want to eliminate some pins tell me and I'll explain what to cut.

If its not to complicated please do!

[fahrenheit]

Sounds like you are seeing composite or S-Video instead of RGB. Is the TV set to RGB in the setup menu and are you using an RGB compatible SCART input?
If your TV is anything like mine, you have a couple of SCART inputs, one supports composite, S-Video and RGB and the other supports composite and S-Video only!
If your TV detects RGB automatically then we don't want to cut anything just yet.

[schmuck]

Its in the right scart slot and on the rgb channel, i know cause it auto detects when i put an rgb cable in scart slot 1! If i put it in scart-slot 2 i get composite picture with some dotcrawl.

[fahrenheit]

Because I have manual control of my TVs inputs, I can force SCART to be RGB or S-Video etc  Seeing as your TV auto-detects the RGB signal and switches to the AV channel, cutting wires will lose you this functionality and probably place the TV in composite. If you can get yourself another SCART cable, nothing fancy, just one which can be easily opened up then you have something to compare and test with.

I get the impression that like me, you have more than one RGB SCART device. Consider this great bit of kit from Joytech, which I use to connect my four consoles up to my single RGB SCART input.


Joytech AV Control Center

Before I had this, I had a cheap 5-way SCART splitter block. The input sockets all run in series, with an output on the end. The input closest to the output had the best picture and each socket back had progressively worse picture quality.

SCART is definitely not made to be plugged in and out all the time, a worn socket can be a nightmare, when the connector keeps dropping out.

[schmuck]

Funny that it has taken so long for a company to put out a propper scart switch box. I have spent hundreds of swedish crowns on diffrent scart solution thru out the last ten years and they where all shit. Ive seen that one and have heard nothing but good things about it and i intend to buy one once i get the cash.

Ive fiddled around with the contrast and other things so its gotten a bit better. It is kinda sad that ms skimped on the tv-chip when they where so generous with everything else.


Anyway thanks for the informative answers.

[fahrenheit]

Pleasure.

It has sucked for many years to be in a PAL territory. We have had to miss-out on important games, games with poor framerates and poor conversions with black borders (Nintendo has till more recently, almost ignored PAL altogether). This generation of consoles have been a lot better with PAL60 options,  but HDTV has been where we have been left in the dust, forcing us into 'underground' methods of modification inorder to have the same enjoyment as our NTSC counterparts.

[schmuck]

I fully agree!