# Difference between RGB, VGA and Component?



## endoverend (Sep 19, 2014)

So I heard than in Europe there's a type of cable called RGB that apparently looks awesome on retro consoles. But why isn't it supported in America? Is it a better or worse picture than VGA and Component? And what do the cable look like?


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## mightymuffy (Sep 19, 2014)

There's people out there that'll give you a far more technical answer than me , but the fact of the matter is an RGB cable can only output at a maximum of 480i, thus, for anything recent a vga or component is obviously a better choice, but for retro consoles the picture is superior to s-video. Basically here in Europe an RGB cable for anything up to the N64 is a fine purchase (and vga aside also a good buy for the PS2 & GC - PAL GCs didn't have 480p support)


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## endoverend (Sep 19, 2014)

So retro game consoles in the US don't have ports for RGB? And the best picture you can get in the US is S-Video? That's not fair... also it doesn't make very much sense.


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## Foxi4 (Sep 19, 2014)

RGB = Red, Green and Blue channels are separated - comes in SCART flavour _(Europe)_
Component = RGB signal converted into Y _(Luma [brightness/luminance] and synchronisation)_, Pb _(difference between Luma and Blue [Y-B])_ and Pr _(difference between Luma and Red [Y-R])_
VGA = Video Graphics Array, a video standard set by IBM, supports a ton of different video modes.



endoverend said:


> So retro game consoles in the US don't have ports for RGB? And the best picture you can get in the US is S-Video? That's not fair... also it doesn't make very much sense.


They have the exact same ports - it's your TV's that couldn't handle RGB since you've never adopted SCART and skipped straight to Component.


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## endoverend (Sep 19, 2014)

Foxi4 said:


> RGB = Red, Green and Blue channels are separated - comes in SCART flavour _(Europe)_
> Component = RGB signal converted into Y _(Luma [brightness/luminance] and synchronisation)_, Pb _(difference between Blue and Luma)_ and Py _(difference between Luma and Red)_
> VGA = Video Graphics Array, a video standard set by IBM, supports a ton of different video modes.


 
Wow. Perfect. Thanks!
And I know it's legit cause you spelled it "flavour".


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## Foxi4 (Sep 19, 2014)

endoverend said:


> Wow. Perfect. Thanks! And I know it's legit cause you spelled it "flavour".


Top hue.  You're welcome.


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## war2thegrave (Sep 19, 2014)

endoverend said:


> So retro game consoles in the US don't have ports for RGB? And the best picture you can get in the US is S-Video? That's not fair... also it doesn't make very much sense.


 
Not exactly. many consoles do, but north american televions didn't.


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## endoverend (Sep 19, 2014)

war2thegrave said:


> Not exactly. many consoles do, but north american televions didn't.


 
Aaah, okay. But why not? Are Americans just happier with worse picture or what?


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## Lumstar (Sep 19, 2014)

No standardization. We didn't agree upon a consumer analog 15khz RGB socket.
On old computer monitors you'll see DIN, mini DIN, small d-sub, large d-sub...


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## grossaffe (Sep 19, 2014)

Foxi explained component pretty well and the color-space it uses.  I would like to point out that YPbPr refers specifically to an analog signal, while it's counterpart, YCrCb is a digital signal (also, Foxi, you accidentally wrote Py instead of Pr).

For RGB and VGA, well RGB is actually just a color-space (defined with Red, Green, and Blue components), while VGA is a video standard that uses the RGB color-space to encode it's picture.  VGA also uses analog color signals, but also includes separate Horizontal and Vertical syncing signals that tell the display when to move to the next line or the next frame.
Typically in the context of older consoles, though, RGB is referring to the SCART standard used in Europe.



endoverend said:


> Aaah, okay. But why not? Are Americans just happier with worse picture or what?


Well first off, this is history, not the present.  Secondly, back then, we also got 60 Hz refresh rate versus 50 Hz that Europe got, so each region had the superiority to the other when it comes to picture.  As for why we didn't use RGB, beats me.  TVs use RGB internally, so to use composite they have to separate out the different color signals first.  A technically inclined person could feed an RGB signal to their display, but you're not gonna find any standard cables for the average consumer to do it.
Nowadays, though, everyone's using Component or HDMI HD signals, and Europe now has their PAL 60 to match our refresh rate, so we're pretty much on even footing.


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## war2thegrave (Sep 19, 2014)

endoverend said:


> Aaah, okay. But why not? Are Americans just happier with worse picture or what?


 
Could be many reasons.
The most likely though is that americans are cheap, often to our own detrement.
We don't flinch at sacrificing quallity for cost and that shortsightedness sometimes
 leads us to paying $2.00 later so we can save $1.00 now.


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## Foxi4 (Sep 19, 2014)

grossaffe said:


> _(...)_ also, Foxi, you accidentally wrote Py instead of Pr.


Whoopsie! Correcting that now.


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## GBA rocks (Sep 20, 2014)

If we're talking history, both sides had drawbacks
US: lack of RGB (vs RGB over SCART in virtually every TV sold in Europe)
Europe: game development in USA/Jap mostly made natively in 60Hz 480i --> hit or miss 50Hz 576i conversions

If we're talking present (retrogaming CRT niche)
US: far easier to find HD 1080i CRTs for xbox original, ps3 and x360 gaming (vs HD CRTs never really took off in Europe)
Europe: far easier to find RGB SD CRT TVs (but this is mostly moot because nowadays CRT gaming aficionados will look for used Sony PVM/BVM professional monitors, which are available both in US and Europe and don't use SCART but RGB/YPbPr over Component-to-BNC leads, and S-video)

The latter reasoning lead me to import an American (GC bc) Wii because nowadays I consider more valuable/flexible to have Component+Svideo (vs Component+SCART on pal Wii) and perfect support for 60Hz software with nothing to "force" or workarounds.

Last thing to point out: while Composite (yellow RCA thingy) is unacceptable, S-video is completely fine and clear. Sure RGB is better but the gap is slimmer than Composite vs S-video. Today, I would happily trade SCART RGB with the American privilege of finding 1080i HD CRT TVs in garage sales around the corner. Back in the day, PS1 over SCART RGB on any TV was the thing of wonders. (and still Sony included the shitty Composite cable as the default option in the box, up to ps3 days)

Fun fact: to save money, on cheap TVs if there were, say, 3 SCART inputs, only 1 of them would have the full pinout with RGB+Composite+Audio, whereas the others would only support Composite+Audio. That's probably why Sony kept including the Composite-to-SCART cable instead of a RGB-over-SCART, to have 100% compatibility with any SCART port and tv set.

tldr: you can carry RGB (instead of YUV/YPbPr/YCbCr) over Component leads if both ends support it (ps2 can do it if you toggle it in the options browser), SCART is just the "pipe" not the signal, and S-video is fine anyway, compared to the 60Hz to 50Hz pain in the ass conversions in Europe.


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## endoverend (Sep 20, 2014)

I don't know, but ps2 composite vs S-video never looked that different to me. However, after my S-video cable busted and I went back to composite, I literally couldn't play the damn thing, it hurt my eyes.
Same goes for Dreamcast.


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## grossaffe (Sep 20, 2014)

endoverend said:


> I don't know, but ps2 composite vs S-video never looked that different to me. However, after my S-video cable busted and I went back to composite, I literally couldn't play the damn thing, it hurt my eyes.
> Same goes for Dreamcast.


S-video was certainly a clear difference when it came to 2D games.  It got rid of the dot-crawl related to composite.  Probably not as clear in early jagged 3D games.


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## Lumstar (Sep 28, 2014)

GBA rocks said:


> tldr: you can carry RGB (instead of YUV/YPbPr/YCbCr) over Component leads if both ends support it (ps2 can do it if you toggle it in the options browser), SCART is just the "pipe" not the signal, and S-video is fine anyway, compared to the 60Hz to 50Hz pain in the ass conversions in Europe.


 
Not enough pins for a complete image. Component uses 3 pins, standard RGB needs at minimum 4 (red/green/blue/sync).


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## Fat D (Sep 28, 2014)

Lumstar said:


> Not enough pins for a complete image. Component uses 3 pins, standard RGB needs at minimum 4 (red/green/blue/sync).


Not exactly. Sync pulses happen between the lines of the image, so they can be mixed onto any channel losslessly. Component and S-Video mix it on Y, on RGB you can mix it onto the green channel. SCART does not do so, though, it uses the dedicated composite line to carry the sync pulses, often as part of a complete composite signal.



GBA rocks said:


> Fun fact: to save money, on cheap TVs if there were, say, 3 SCART inputs, only 1 of them would have the full pinout with RGB+Composite+Audio, whereas the others would only support Composite+Audio. That's probably why Sony kept including the Composite-to-SCART cable instead of a RGB-over-SCART, to have 100% compatibility with any SCART port and tv set.


Actually, you can feed composite and RGB simultaneously, so that is not the reason. The actual reason is that RGB takes 3 more wires (6 if you want a dedicated return path for each, which is standard for SCART), so wiring just composite is cheaper. Interestingly, I had once used a sony television that had two SCART ports, labeled "AV1/RGB" and "AV2/YC2", with an additional "AV3/YC3" available at the front made up of composite, S-Video and audio. The YC2 port actually accepted S-Video signals over the RGB lines, transmitting Y over composite and C over red.

One interesting feature of SCART is its bidirectionality. Back in the day, you could connect a television to a VCR using SCART and use a single tuner for both to record what you are watching. The composite and audio lines are duplicated on the connector, with one line going from the television to the VCR and one line going back. Since analog television was broadcast as a composite signal anyway, you did not need the full RGB set to feed into the VCR, you could use composite without loss of quality, whereas direct-to-cassette productions could use the full RGB quality to go straight from the tape to the screen.



grossaffe said:


> Secondly, back then, we also got 60 Hz refresh rate versus 50 Hz that Europe got, so each region had the superiority to the other when it comes to picture.


The 60 Hz was balanced by the higher resolution we could fit into a single picture, though. The broadcast systems commonly used in Europe, which by the way have little to do with the color encodings PAL/SECAM/NTSC other than geographical correlations, namely B, C, D, G, H, I, K and L, as well as the overseas K' and N, all support 625 instead of 525 lines, resulting in 576 instead of 480 visible lines while still having more time for a single line than NTSC formats, resulting in finer details to be visible with the same bandwidth. Of course, that was back in the day where slowly-refreshing screens tended to flicker a lot, so the American system M with its 60 Hz had a clear advantage there - though that was due to the higher mains frequency over there.


grossaffe said:


> As for why we didn't use RGB, beats me. TVs use RGB internally, so to use composite they have to separate out the different color signals first. A technically inclined person could feed an RGB signal to their display, but you're not gonna find any standard cables for the average consumer to do it.


The advantage of Y/C over RGB is that you only need two lines instead of three. And even with component, the two color signals can be of lower quality than the Y signal, because the human eye resolves brightness more finely than color. Which is why pretty much every storage and broadcast format uses YUV or a variation.


grossaffe said:


> Nowadays, though, everyone's using Component or HDMI HD signals, and Europe now has their PAL 60 to match our refresh rate, so we're pretty much on even footing.


60 Hz PAL is not even European. It was originally set up for Brazil, which has 60 Hz mains power and therefore used system M for black-and-white television, but unlike every other M country adopted PAL instead of NTSC. PAL60 is not exactly that though, according to Wikipedia it uses the same color carrier as PAL-BDGKI, instead of PAL-M which uses the same one as NTSC-M. It is just some weird hybrid that some manufacturers came up with to slightly widen the range of televisions that could be fed a signal of 60 Hz field rate. Most televisions that eat PAL60 should also take PAL-M and NTSC-M, though, so there is little gain there.


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## SolarFusion (Sep 28, 2014)

endoverend said:


> Wow. Perfect. Thanks!
> And I know it's legit cause you spelled it "flavour".


 

Actually spelling it "F-L-A-V-O-U-R, Flavour" is European/Canadian. Spelling it "F-L-A-V-O-R, Flavor" is American. XD Confusing but neither is wrong.

SF


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## Sicklyboy (Sep 28, 2014)

Relevant, I'm lazily working on building this, supposed to very nicely convert RGB to YUV (usable on almost all Component inputs). Supposed to be a lot nicer than S-Video, obviously straight RGB would be the way to go but that's not feasible for most people.

Edit - would help if I provided the schematic. http://i.imgur.com/kei1oan.png

Edit 2 - also, source thread, some absolutely phenomenal information in all of it.  http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...Component-converter-design-using-the-BA7230LS


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## endoverend (Sep 28, 2014)

That's a pretty cool project. I've been trying to buy s-video cables for everything, but it just doesn't make that big of a difference. Keep it up!


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## FAST6191 (Sep 28, 2014)

Hmm, I picked up an old VGA downscaler from an old plasma TV (got to love electronics junk bins). I was going to just reverse engineer it a bit and harvest the parts (it sports some very nice nichicon capacitors), however if we have fun things like this as an option I might have to look into actually doing something with it.


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## tbb043 (Sep 28, 2014)

endoverend said:


> That's a pretty cool project. I've been trying to buy s-video cables for everything, but it just doesn't make that big of a difference. Keep it up!



S-video was great, I was using that for almost everything from SNES up until I got an HDTV with no S-video (damn cheaping out). I mean, I've never had RGB to compare it to, but looking at S-video vs 480i component, I agree with whoever it was way up in the thread that said the jump between them was less significant than the jump between composite and S-video. Which itself was generally not as significant as going from rf to composite. Man, rf was the worst.


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## Lumstar (Sep 28, 2014)

Fat D said:


> Not exactly. Sync pulses happen between the lines of the image, so they can be mixed onto any channel losslessly. Component and S-Video mix it on Y, on RGB you can mix it onto the green channel. SCART does not do so, though, it uses the dedicated composite line to carry the sync pulses, often as part of a complete composite signal.


 
I forgot about that. PS2 moves sync to green, when running games at 480p or above, technically fixing the issue.
But I'm not aware of a TV who supports sync on green RGB from RCA jacks.


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## Thomas83Lin (Sep 28, 2014)

Sicklyboy said:


> Relevant, I'm lazily working on building this, supposed to very nicely convert RGB to YUV (usable on almost all Component inputs). Supposed to be a lot nicer than S-Video, obviously straight RGB would be the way to go but that's not feasible for most people.
> 
> Edit - would help if I provided the schematic. http://i.imgur.com/kei1oan.png
> 
> Edit 2 - also, source thread, some absolutely phenomenal information in all of it. http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showth...Component-converter-design-using-the-BA7230LS


Nice, I may give this a go also.

edit: Well I've now ordered everything needed, I'll be installing this on a genesis, maybe also a snes since I ordered enough to make 2-3


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