S-Video vs Component (1 Viewer)

Just wondering if someone could break down the differences for me, or just tell me which one is better than the other?

Home Theater magazine compared all 3 video connection types on a 50" Reference RPTV. Here was their conclusions:

Composite - Single cable with RCA plugs: baseline

SVideo - cable with funny 'keyboard' connector: 20% better than composite

Component - 3 identical RCA cables: 25% better than composite

The report noted that the difference was LESS for smaller-sized displays, and greater for larger ones.

The SVideo and Component connections both bypass the TV comb filter. These filters are expensive and less-than-perfect. As long as the source came from a already-seperated master - the picture is usually better.

Does this help?

thats great, thanks bob,

have just had the local av company telling me svideo is the best and i shouldnt be using component.

Bob's right, if you have the ability to use component, go with it. To add to what Bob said, component cables have 3 cales, so they carry three signals, two chroma signals and one luminance. Video is stored on DVD in the component format, so if you output via component from the dvd player, you stay closer to the source video.

S-video can only carry two signals, so the dvd player must downconvert the video and combine the two chroma channels into one. The end result of S-video is one chroma channel and one luminance channel.

Composite output through a dvd player combines the two chroma signals and the luminance together onto one cable, and requires a comb filter in the TV to split the chroma and luminance signals.

As you can see, the signal gets becomes less true to the source as they go down. Component will give you the most true to the source image.

Josh:

What's the name and Email address or website of the the A/V store that told you that an S-video would give you a better picture than component?