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[FLANNERY]

Hi new to the forum but this looked like the top notch place for all things atari. I have my dad's old four switch woody hooked up to my 15inch polaroid LCD HD tv and love it. For grins and giggles I hooked it up to a slightly smaller old CRT tv. I was amazed to find that the color looked so much better! The hues are amazing, but objects are not as sharp and there is more screen flickering. On my polaroid it is much more sharp and sreen flicker is reduced but the colors are all washed out. Is there a way to improve this? Ive tried fiddleing with my tv's settings but nothing seems to change. I guess Atari's just need to be played on a older set.

 

 

[DickNixonArisen]

I've never cared for LCD or even any kind of hi-def tv... the blacks are not deep enough in my opinion. Maybe that's the issue? They always look crisp but desaturated to my eyes. Not everyone has the same eyes, I guess.

[FLANNERY]

I love it with my ps3, but I just does not look right for my atari. My NES looks ok, but it still looks better on a CRT too. The blacks do not bother my as bad as the other colors like reds, blues, yellows, greens and browns.

[DickNixonArisen]

Even as far back as the Ps1 which I kinda thought had a flat/grey undertone to most games, which would match an LCD well. Fine in some games, like a resident evil or whatever, but doesn't look right with cartoony/nintendo style graphics.

[tetrode kink]

One problem could be all the digital preprocessing the LCD TV does with the image before it sends it to its display buffer. The TV could be interpreting the Atari's flickering of objects as interlace flicker, a some-time occurrence in NTSC pictures which is normally undesirable. Some LCD TVs have circuitry or processing to reduce the flicker effect, possibly by "blurring" or "combining" flickering areas across frames. To the TV, Atari flicker would be undistinguishable from interlace flicker, so the TV tries to mitigate it. Many modern HD TVs will try to sharpen old NTSC signals by hardening edges, so there's your sharper picture. But IMHO, most LCD displays are a little dull, I've always preferred CRTs for their brighter presence.

 

BTW, depending on the model of the TV, the aforementioned preprocessing can also add a frame (or more?) of time delay to the signal-to-screen time, so if you play a super-twitch game on your Atari on your HD TV, don't be surprised if you notice your scores deteriorating, compared to playing on a CRT. For that reason, there's no beating the CRT TV for just displaying what it gets, without all the processing whoop-tee-do.

 

-tet

 

[edit]Just deleted a few unneeded text scraps I should have axed the first time...[/edit]

Edited April 8, 2010 by tetrode kink

[FLANNERY]

Also a while back I replaced my rf cord with a old cheap dvd player one. My atari is a four switch so to make it fit into the jack I had to trim of some excess plastic on the end of the cord and shorten the center prong. Is there a better way to go about this? Im kind of afraid that I might damage the board or casing because I had to put a lot of pressure on it to screw it back together tight. The case also has some play on the right side and there is a slight bump that I can feel inthe middle where the cord plugs into the jack. My old cord was starting to make color turn into black and white and there was a lot of static interferance and flickering. Picture quality is much better now but im afraid that I might break something.