PS2 Do Adapters Actually Improve PS2 Picture Quality?

Z

ZephyrSys

Forum Noob
Hey everyone,
I found a few adapters that might upgrade the picture quality of my PS2. However I have some questions.
1. I found a composite to SCART adapter however its missing a lot of pins and I wonder which type of SCART is it. Will it improve anything or not.
2. I found a composite to S-video adapter will that improve anything?
Im pretty sceptical here because they aren't converters so I'm not sure if any of this does anything. Am I only left with the option to purchase a PS2 to component cable online?
 
Alright so first of all, a composite-to-scart adapter will not improve image quality at all. That adapter you found, which is missing tons of pins as you're saying, is likely just a Composite-on-SCART cable, electrically identical to a regular composite cable.

The composite-to-Svideo is the same story. It will not at all improve image quality because it is just taking the inferior composite signal and converting it to S-Video (it can't just "create" a better image out of nowhere when the incoming signal is inferior).

What you must do is get a true PS2 Component (do not confuse with Composite) or a RGB-SCART cable. retrogamingcables.co.uk sells the highest quality cables for this purpose.

Component is a connector that was used in North America and therefore your European TV may not have it (I recommend you get a scaler like the RetroTink 4K or 5X anyways, which have all those connectors). It consists of 5 cables, 3 for video and 2 for audio.

RGB-SCART has all signals into one cable and is theoretically superior to Component since it separates the sync pulses of the video signal into its own pin inside the SCART connector and sends in the signal in its raw form inside the cable (Component instead transforms the signal into YPbPr then your TV decodes that, which in theory could produce slight image degradation). However from my testing, I cannot notice the difference between Component and RGB-SCART as they are both very high quality anyways and any theoretical losses from using Component cables is too small to be perceptible by the human eye. The only downside with RGB-SCART is that the PS2 uses 2 different sync standards when you are using RGB-SCART, RGBS for 480i resolution and RGsB for 480p/1080i resolutions. The latter, RGsB, is often not be supported by a lot of TVs and lots of scalers too. This ultimately depends on your setup (what TV are you using?, Are you using a scaler?) and I could better help you and guide you if I had this information.
 
If you output composite from your PS2, you'll get composite quality, even if you adapt it to SCART or S-Video. You need to output directly SCART, S-Video or component from your PS2 to improve image quality (by using a ps2 cable that outputs directly one of those formats), not convert composite to any of those formats.
 
Buy component, and it will open you the way to progressive scan resolutions, also higher ones. Plus buy hardware upscaller. GSM cannot be used every time on everything.

Composite limiting you to 480i.
 
LeoneFamily said:
Alright so first of all, a composite-to-scart adapter will not improve image quality at all. That adapter you found, which is missing tons of pins as you're saying, is likely just a Composite-on-SCART cable, electrically identical to a regular composite cable.

The composite-to-Svideo is the same story. It will not at all improve image quality because it is just taking the inferior composite signal and converting it to S-Video (it can't just "create" a better image out of nowhere when the incoming signal is inferior).

What you must do is get a true PS2 Component (do not confuse with Composite) or a RGB-SCART cable. retrogamingcables.co.uk sells the highest quality cables for this purpose.

Component is a connector that was used in North America and therefore your European TV may not have it (I recommend you get a scaler like the RetroTink 4K or 5X anyways, which have all those connectors). It consists of 5 cables, 3 for video and 2 for audio.

RGB-SCART has all signals into one cable and is theoretically superior to Component since it separates the sync pulses of the video signal into its own pin inside the SCART connector and sends in the signal in its raw form inside the cable (Component instead transforms the signal into YPbPr then your TV decodes that, which in theory could produce slight image degradation). However from my testing, I cannot notice the difference between Component and RGB-SCART as they are both very high quality anyways and any theoretical losses from using Component cables is too small to be perceptible by the human eye. The only downside with RGB-SCART is that the PS2 uses 2 different sync standards when you are using RGB-SCART, RGBS for 480i resolution and RGsB for 480p/1080i resolutions. The latter, RGsB, is often not be supported by a lot of TVs and lots of scalers too. This ultimately depends on your setup (what TV are you using?, Are you using a scaler?) and I could better help you and guide you if I had this information.
Click to expand...
I don't have a scaler and Im using a Philips 42PFL7662D/05 TV that has component and SCART inputs. I've been thinking of just getting a CRT or plasma TV because the scalers are expensive whereas I can find a CRT for free
 
I'd just get a component cable even on the Wii which only supports up to 480p, 576P with homebrew you can notice a quality difference to composite 480i the Gamecube on rgb-scart still looks sharper imo though, those Wii2Hdmi adaptors are all garbage that scale 480p to 720p or 1080p, the 480p only model is crap also it has screen artifacts from the scaler & it doesn't understand the 4:3/16:9 screen format as it letterboxs everything within a 16:9 window from the 480p signal.
 
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