composite to s-video converters (1 Viewer)

[Steve Salis]

Hi everyone,My name is Steve and I live in Melbourne Australia.I am contacting your fantastic website due to sheer exasperation in not finding what I want here in australia ,could someone please help me and put me out of my misery. I have recently purchased a new digital satellite set top box thru a pay tv broadcaster unfortunately this box only shows composite out and nothing else.My tv accepts s-video and I would love to purchase a composite to s-video upconverter,I have found something on monster cable website model csvc-1 under heading of video splitters and adapters.But there asking price of US $100 is way high for me as this equates to something close to $200 AUD. Does anyone know of a similar product that delivers a good quality picture at a much cheaper price.Are these converters able to be used here in australia and silly question compatible with pal and not ntsc.I would greatly appreciate any help as this inferior tv picture is driving me crazy. Many thanks Steve

 

[Jeremy Little]

The adapter isn't going to improve picture quality, the signal is already composite coming off the box.. Even though it is going from Composite to S-video, the adapter could actually make it worse than composite.

 

[Bob McElfresh]

I'm afraid Jeremy is correct.

Your television has a "Comb Filter" whos job is to convert composite->svideo. It is one of the most expensive parts of your television. Televisions used to be judged by how good this filter was.

You "can" find small composite to Svideo adaptors for about $10 US at Radio Shack stores. But these little plugs are simple filters and usually do a poor job/worse than the TV of the conversion. I only recommend them as a last resort.

SVideo will only give you better picture if:

- The source material travels to your house as SVideo all the way.

Once the video signals are mixed together, it will never filter out as good back to SVideo.

In the early days of DVD I kept both composite and SVideo hooked up to my TV and I would show friends the difference in picture quality by toggling back and forth.

When my CATV box arrived with both output, I was shocked to find that the difference between the 2 connections was hardly noticible. Turns out something upstream mixed the video and did the damage before the signal showed up at my house. The SVideo conversion did not help.

My advice: go back to the satalite provider and get a different box.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

The only use I ever found for one of these convertors (and I paid around $100 for one) was in my first "serious" home theater in the laserdisc days when s-video was the best connection available and I had a VCR that did not have an s-video output. I was running my S-VHS tape deck, my laserdisc player and my first DVD player through my a/v receiver with s-video cable to my TV and you can't mix composite and s-video, so if I was going to include my old VCR in the system (and I wanted to) the cable was a necessity. I later gave it to a friend of my when I got my first TiVO and retired the second VCR.

Regards,

Joe