Test Caps - various composite and s-video cables

[sanlyn]

One of the oldest old wives tales in audio/video: "[x] brand of cable dramatically improves the [sound/picture]."

It's all nonsense.

I disagree 50%. That 50% is the statement that you don't agree with, i.e, that such and such cable "improves" something. No cable improves anything. The test of a good cable is how well it transmits the original signal while inflicting as little damage as possible in doing so, not how it "changes" anything.

The other 50% is that all wire doesn't behave the same way. They don't look alike, they don't sound alike. If all wire looks and sounds alike to you then, construction and durability factors aside, tests and reviews and opinions really are meaningless nonsense. Use whatever you want. The so-so and worse quality of most consumer a/v products from the bix box stores will distort everything anyway.

[Brad]

Wow, 6-year-old necro.

[Mini-Me]

This is an old thread, but I appreciate the necropost, since it's the first time I've seen it.

I noticed something interesting: All of the S-Video cables look essentially the same, and all of the composite cables look the same as well...except for the first. The first one has slightly different dot crawl and slightly different rainbow noise from the others...and I suspect the difference has absolutely nothing to do with the cable itself.

The rainbowing and dot crawl are introduced when the DVD player creates the composite signal from the original separated YUV signals on disc...or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're introduced when the composite signal is decoded? Either way, it's telling that they look basically identical on three of the four composite cables. I think the dot crawl and rainbowing introduced by the composition process have a cyclical (probably 2-frame) nature to them, and the DVD player or capture device just used a different phase in the first capture due to timing issues. If you took a few more captures with each, you'd eventually see captures with the first cable that look like the rest, and you'd eventually see captures with the other cables that look like the first.

Other than that, I don't see any significant differences: Every cable has slightly different cable noise of course, but that's to be expected even when you take multiple captures with the same cable. I couldn't really say any of the differences exceed that threshold, so I definitely couldn't say any are better than the others. It would be interesting to see a comparison that tests how different shielding levels may affect ghosting though.

[Brad]

The first one has slightly different dot crawl and slightly different rainbow noise from the others...and I suspect the difference has absolutely nothing to do with the cable itself.

The rainbowing and dot crawl are introduced when the DVD player creates the composite signal from the original separated YUV signals on disc...or perhaps it would be more accurate to say they're introduced when the composite signal is decoded? Either way, it's telling that they look basically identical on three of the four composite cables. I think the dot crawl and rainbowing introduced by the composition process have a cyclical (probably 2-frame) nature to them, and the DVD player or capture device just used a different phase in the first capture due to timing issues.

I found that to be the case when I was doing my capture card comparisons. The cycle wasn't every other frame though, more like 3-4 I believe. I was surprised how similar the artifacts in "different" frames and across different captures could look as I previously thought they were random.

[jagabo]

In my experience NTSC dot crawl has a 2 frame cycle, PAL dot crawl has a 4 frame cycle. If you open the following videos (lagarith AVI) with AviSynth and use SelectEvery(2) for the NTSC video, or SelectEvery(4) for the PAL video, you'll see the dot crawl pattern remains static.

And yes, with short cables and decent equipment, there's essentially no difference cheap and expensive composite cables, or between cheap and expensive s-video cables. Different amounts of shielding may make a difference in very noisy environments.

Unless you want to argue that all those manufacturers got together and agreed to make all their cables exactly as bad as each other and have such great quality control that they were able to do that.

[darito]

I was wondering if ferrite beads or "core filters" make a visual difference. I read in a camcorder manual (JVC GR-DVM75 MiniDV) the following:

"In order to maintain optimum performance of the camcorder, provided cables may be equipped with one or more core filter. If a cable has only one core filter, the end that is closest to the filter should be connected to the camcorder."

It mentions that core filters in S-video cables reduce interference, it shows pictured a DV firewire cable with two core filters and mentions it reduces interference as well.

I have to buy some cables to transfer VHS tapes though a MiniDV camcorder and I was wondering if cables with these filters and firewire cables would actually make a difference.

[peg]

I downloaded the images and viewed them at their actual resolution (704x480). I see essentially no difference between the cable types except s-video vs composite. If you look at them in a browser, you may be seeing mostly scaling artifacts IMHO.