Component cable output, is it RGB?

[RayB]

I searched and read the FAQ and haven't found the answer to this:

Is "component" output the same or similar to RGB that an arcade monitor uses? It seems to be. It has red, green, blue, and a sync.

Long ago, I hacked up a SCART cable for Super Nintendo, and wired it directly to an arcade monitor... and it worked. So I'm wondering if I could do the same with a component cable.

Here's why I am asking: I want to play PS2 and GameCube games on an arcade monitor.

~Ray B.

[tom61]

Odd, never heard of one with a sync cable, but no, Component and RGB are not the same (Component just happens to have red, green, and blue plugs). The quality is pretty good and comparable to RGB, but you can't hook it up to an arcade monitor directly, you'd need a converter called a 'transcoder' to change Component to RGB.

As for PS2 to arcade monitor, you can use a PSX SCART cable, like you did with the SNES. Same with Gamecube, or you can hack the 'Digital Video Cable' that normally outputs Component, to output RGB instead. (it has a small chip inside that actually converts the GC's output to various formats, depending on how it's wired). A search for 'Gamecube VGA mod' should turn up instructions for making (just don't turn 'progressive' mode on the GC on, and the 'VGA' mod will output 15kHz RGB that the arcade monitor needs)

[StephenH]

Component is NOT RGB.  They are two different things entirely.  Component  separates the signals a different way than RGB, and is slightly lower quality than RGB, but in many cases a little better than S-Video.

[darklegion]

All consoles that output component will output rgb,even if it requires a hack in order to do it.www.gamesx.com is the site for this sort of stuff.
BTW rgb is a form of component,as is colour difference.Colour difference is normally what people refer to when they say component however.Both rgb and colour differnece are much better than s-video but the difference between composite and svideo is greater than than the difference between rgb and svideo...and the difference between colour difference and rgb is miniscule,at least as far as the eye can see.

[MonitorGuru]

The basic difference between component (aka "Colorstream (tm)" - Toshiba) and pure RGB is bandwidth. In psuedo techie, psuedo laymans terms here is the basic info:


RGB uses a high amount of bandwidth, the same amount of bandwidth to describe each of the 3 parts of the signal.

Component uses a smaller amount (IIRC ~1/3rd smaller) of bandwidth, it allocates the largest amount of bandwith to the Luminance (Y) (e.g. black and white 'brightness') signal and then half each to the difference between Luminance (Y) and Blue (B) and Luminance (L) and Red (R). Green can be automatically determined in a basic alegebra equation given those three signals.

The basic reason this works is that the eye/brain is most sensitive to brightness changes in Luminance, NOT color shifts in chrominance (color),  and is significantly less sensitive to changes in blue and red light so less bandwidth is used to describe the changes.

Truely, component is simply a slight upgrade to S-Video which is Y/C (Luminance+Chrominance), but it gives a bigger bandwidth to the Y-B and Y-R than the simple C in a S-Video signal, thus giving somewhat better image quality on SOME SETS.

Therefore you can produce a virtually undectable "lower quality" image using color stream and 2/3rds bandwidth instead of RGB using full bandwidth.  Yes, they still both require 3 cables, but when stored digitally or transferred in other ways, the bandwidth is less.  

In fact, color differential video is how the video on DVDs are actually stored in bits..   They're not stored in RGB form like many people think.

Here's a good site giving pretty basic explanations of these technologies: http://www.projectorcentral.com/component.htm


Side note (relative to component video and another thread in this forum):

Component video is just one of the reasons that "hacking a TV set to display arcade video" is such a hard thing to do.   Almost all of the sets made since the mid-80's have IC's on them, and the IC takes the tuner or VCR color composite and/or Svideo input and outputs component video for the rest of the circuit all the way up to the neckboard.  

Therefore on many sets there are no "RGB" points to hack into directly on the circuit board, just Y/Cr/Cb  which of course isn't what computers or arcade boards output.  It's not until late in the neckboard just before the tube itself do the signals actually become pure RGB to the 3 guns in the tube, once they are of course amplified up to 25-30 volt signals to drive the guns--far from the .7 volts a computer outputs or 5 volts a video game board outputs.

This is why it's NOT a good idea to attempt to willy-nilly hack a consumer TV set's existing boards to accept RGB directly, besides the whole isolation (transformer) issues as well.