In the post I made just above this, there's a link to a direct comparison of Composite, S-Video, and RGB.iNCEPTIONAL wrote: ↑Fri May 27, 2022 12:36 amI would be very interested in finding out how clear the difference is between normal-res and high-res (both pseudo high-res and actual high-res) when run through a decent connection like S-Video, Composite SCART, RGB SCART (particularly when compared to default Composite), also on modern TVs/monitors/displays too, in PAL vs NTSC, when viewed in 8:7 pixel perfect mode vs 4:3, and even on systems like the 3DS, Switch, SNES Mini and modern emulators, etc.
If you want a summary of how these 3 things generally compare:
- 1. RGB output on a good TV is as clean as an emulator. (Unrelated to picture sharpness: unlike an emulator, the pixel aspect ratio is wider, and will have a stronger gamma brightness curve.)
- 2. S-Video can be almost as good as RGB, but detailed colour changes can get muddled. (See my comment in that post.)
- 3. Composite has conflicts (i.e. rainbow fringes) between brightness and colour anywhere there is detail. In hi-res the conflicts are twice as apparent.
Some TVs of the time won't be as good with RGB or S-Video as they could be, though that's the TV's problem, not the console, or the signal type.
So the short of it is that mostly you can just guess how RGB will look based on emulation. Composite is the only one with significant compromise, and emulators do have a fairly accurate "NTSC filter" emulation you can try. (e.g. try bsnes)
Otherwise If you want some real CRT photos of several hires games under composite, I posted some higher up in the thread. Compare those photos to bsnes' NTSC filter and you might get an idea of emulator-vs-reality. Real TVs tend to be a little blurrier than the emulator filters.
Interlacing (vertical high-resolution): This is a bit of a separate issue. The way this looks cannot be demonstrated with a photograph, and how it looks on a CRT can't be demonstrated on an LCD monitor. Even a video is not going to give a very good idea.
PAL vs NTSC: it's often said that PAL is better than NTSC, but what this usually refers to is PAL having extra vertical resolution. For the SNES, the vertical resolution is not increased, so that comparison doesn't matter. With that out of the way, PAL composite has slightly different colour encoding than NTSC composite, so the specific look of the rainbow artifacts differs, but they're in the same quality ballpark as each other. (Also PAL SNES has an even wider pixel aspect ratio, of course.) I haven't yet found an easy to use PAL filter emulation, so it might be harder to demonstrate without the real hardware at hand.
The flicker effect of interlacing is worse on PAL.