I’ve been playing Tales of Symphonia in forced 480p on a VGA monitor, native 480p. I really like using this monitor for Ye Olde PC games, but for the first time I’ve really sat down and put some significant time into a 480p console on it.
And uh. I think my brain is broken.
I don’t like it. It’s very pixelated. I normally don’t mind that but the aliasing is really harsh. And there are some effects in the game, specifically the simple depth-of-field that seems to duplicate-and-shift the image in the distance, seems not right.
I kept getting the feeling that it would look better in 480i on my 15khz consumer-tube security monitor. So I tried it, and I think it does.
Like what I’m saying is I think 480i, s-video, to a low-end lo-fi tube, looks better than those GC component cables delivering 480p to a native 480p display.
The aliasing is a LOT less noticeable, everything looks very smooth because uh there’s just less detail capable of being resolved. The DOF effect looks more natural, it looks more like a camera DOF as intended.
Am I nuts? Can anyone back me up on this.
I took some photos, they’re a bit different for… reasons (it’s really hard to photograph CRTs!) but just ignore the color, brightness, and minor scene differences as well as the moire and tell me if you can see what I see:
480p VGA CRT:
480i low-fi tube:
Take a look at Lloyd… he’s obviously a bit blurry in sample #2 but he’s looking awfully jaggy in sample #1. It’s worse in motion, in this scene the stone pavers shimmer really badly in 480p but look mostly smooth in 480i.