Picuture Quality - RF vs. Composite

[goobee]

Greetings All,

I have an old tube tv (non hi-def) in a spare bedroom. I would like to hook up a standard DirecTV receiver to it. What will give me a better picture, using the RF connector and channel 3, or going through the composite inputs. SVHS is not an option.

Thanks.

 

[Gibson486]

well...composite would be better....but would you really be able to tell?

 

[Apex]

As Gibson486 said, composite is a higher quality connection, however, on that TV, it may be hard to tell.

 

[goobee]

Probably not I guess. It's a decent old Panny tv that's been sitting unused since the airwaves when digital. Thanks.

 

[angminas]

I've always been able to tell the difference even between RF and RCA cables. BIG difference, and my TV was made in 1999. I've also seen a notable difference from RCA to S-Video. I expect the jump from RF to composite to be quite significant. Nothing to lose but the price of a composite cable, right?

 

[Shadowknight]

If nothing else, the picture will be brighter than the RF/coaxial connection. I noticed a huge difference when I plugged my old RCA DVD player to my HDTV with a composite instead of coaxial connection.

 

[goobee]

What the hell, I'll give it a shot tonight after work. But first, I need to find some rca to rca cables. 🙂

 

[Modelworks]

RF will always be worse than other forms on home equipment. They use modulators in dvd players, etc that are not the best quality.

The difference between Svideo and composite is svideo splits the brightness and color signal into two separate wires. Composite they are combined. You can convert an svideo output to composite by just twisting those 2 wires in a svideo cable together to form one wire. So if you wanted the absolute best quality and it was a long run you could run a svideo cable from the box then when it gets to the tv convert it to composite.

Of course the disadvantage with svideo and composite is you still need another cable to carry audio. RF you only need the one.