Superior image on much older tv. Why?

[spottydog]

Hello, you might think that a recent 30''+sony widescreen television would produce a superior image quality for games, compared with a 14 year old 14'' sony trinitron. However, the older television produces an ideal, very sharp and superior image quality.
If I run Dreamcast 3rd Strike in de-interlaced mode on the larger tv, the sharpness is absent. I've tinkered with the settings, if I adjust contrast, sharpness increases but the image is too dark.
Can anybody explain why the older television produces a clearly superior image quality? I understand that if the screen is enormous, the graphics may be blockier, but I find the quality disappointing. Is there something I can try?
                                   thanks

[horseboy]

How are you connecting to the new one? If you hook it up via component, I don't see how the older one could be better. I dunno.

[MonMotha]

Turn off all the scalers and upconverters.  Hopefully your TV can actually do 480i...  Some of the new ones can't go down that low and have to at least deinterlace everything, which introduces some weird artifacting (even when done right, it's not the same as real interlace scanning happening on the tube as the phosphor decay time isn't right).

Modern TVs have bunches of digital filters and stuff on them designed to make crappy signals (broadcast TV) look better.  However, to usually do more harm than good on very good signals (svideo or better from a good source).  If you can actually turn them all off (which is sometimes hard), things usually look much better.

Also, modern TVs ship "showroom bright".  At the minimum, you probably need to turn down the contrast (white level, often called "picture"), brightness (black level), and sharpness (a filter that usually does bad things) significantly.  If you have access to gamma (brightness, not to be confused with the brightness control), that probably needs tweaked, too.  Just for quick grins, try setting your contrast to about half to 2/3 (it's probably at or near full by default) and then turn down brightness until black doesn't get any blacker.  Then see which one looks better.  It may still be the old TV, sadly enough...

[spottydog]

Hello, I'm using an rgb scart cable. How do I turn-off the scalers and upconverters? I've been able to improve the image quality. I changed the mode from 'live' to 'movie' and there was a significant improvement. The graphics are now quite sharp. Pressing menu  on the control gives settings for : live, personal, movie and game. The game setting is inferior to movie(why?).
Each mode has values for contrast, brightness, sharpness and others I don't recall. But, in many of the modes I can only access contrast and this setting does not produce the desired quality. I think you may be correct about gamma (correction). I notice that when I pause a game the image becomes clearer again - ideal perhaps. But when I start the game again, the image becomes blurrier.
If I could keep the game at that 'paused' sharpness - I may be satisfied.
But how?