JVC AV27530

[Veinman]

Anyone have any experience with this TV? I'm thinking about getting it for my cabinet. It has component video, but I really want to know if it powers up on power restore, and if it goes back to last input.

Sears

[Veinman]

I went ahead and bought this tv today. I can confirm that it DOES come on once power is restored, and it does return automatically to its last used input.

S-Video looked good, and I don't have the ATI component video adapter yet so I can't comment on that.

At this point I can say that I think it will be a nice addition to my cabinet.

[Veinman]

I got the component video adapter today, and will do a comparison between s-video and component. Any suggestions on what games would be useful for testing purposes?

[Veinman]

First I hooked up S-Video, and checked out Aero Fighters, and Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3. I knew that Midway games tend to have issues with certain videomodes, so I figured that would be a good test.

S-Video performed flawlessly, with no special effort required in windows, short of dropping my desktop to 800x600.

Then I put on the DVI to Component adapter and rebooted. Ugh. The desktop was huge, but wouldn't scroll, so I could only see a portion of it. Also, the refresh was way off, so all the icons kept flickering.

I made sure that the dongle was set to support 480i, and then consulted Ati's documentation for configuring windows. I set the desktop to 640x480, but the only refresh rate that I could get working seemed to be 30 hertz interlaced.

At 32 bit color, MK3 would not display. After dropping down to 256, it did display, but certain screens looked AWFUL. Maybe high color would have worked, but I didn't try it.

Once I finally did get it working, the image was very small, only using about 2/3 of the screen. It did however look very nice, short of the color issues mentioned earlier. I suppose this is just because it was a smaller, tighter image than the full-screen S-Video.

I'm hoping with the appropriate tweaks I can get component video working properly, but so far, I wouldn't spend the $26 on it. I haven't looked around yet, but if you know any good references or threads for this type of configuration, please post them.

[richms]

The flickering is because the svideo encoder does flicker reduction. It will always flicker on interlaced output, exactly as it will on any 15kHz monitor.

[Veinman]

Surely there must be a way to get the component adapter to work correctly? Or did I waste my money?

[richms]

That is working correctly,

You need to have the desktop operating in one of the supported HDTV or SDTV resolutions, which as the TV doesnt do HD, is  xxx by 480. The flicker will happen on any horizontal line thats only one pixel high. That is the nature of interlacing - game consoles will apply a vertical filter to reduce this, but it also reduces the vertical resolution, like the tv encoder chip does.

You should find its fine for mame games that double the scanlines up, but it will still be bouncing up and down 1 scanline with the interlacing.

Others have mentioned disabling interlaceing thru powerstrip, I havent tried this yet as my only SDTV with component is in a totally different room of the house.  - Ideally we would see a component output _from the tv encoder_ on the VGA card, and I saw some mention of TV tool being able to do that on select nvidia cards, but I never looked into it furthur.

[Veinman]

Tonight I finally got the component video working properly. I spent/wasted a lot of time trying to configure powerstrip and then the service menu for the tv.

Ultimately, all I really needed to do to conquer the overscan was to tell Mame to start all games at 640x480!

I haven't tested it too much, but hopefully things will be good now. The image quality is far greater than the S-Video. The Windows desktop looks like hell due to the flicker, but you don't see it at all in games.

As for the service menu, you hit the sleep button on the remote so that it says 0 minutes (default) then hit the video status and display keys  together. That enters the menu. The vertical size settings worked great, but the horizontal settings had no effect whatsoever. I suspect I was locked in a 4:3 image ratio and didn't know how to leave it.

But...if Mame's res settings are all it takes, then I'm happy. It even solved MK2, which for some reason wanted to display HUGE before.