Gaming Tv to computer connection problem

[tijntje_7]

Ohai temp.

I connected my tv to my computer.
Via scart. I'm pretty sure the cable is not low quality, since I have used it with a dvd player and the quality was great (at least for my tv.)
My second 'monitor' looks extremely blurry. I can't read any text :/
My gpu is 9800 xt 128MB it's... old

But still works great. (well not with games... but, you get the point)
The tv looks like if you have bad sight, you aren't wearing glasses/lenses.
It's just really blurry.
I tried different resolutions (all available via windows and ati catalyst control center)
I tried stuff on the tv itself, (contrast, colour, stuff)
I gewgl'd
I tried different refresh rates (really high, and really low, and stable...)

If anybody knows what the problem might be... help me please

Thanks

Edit: Though, it behaves like a second monitor should.. I can place windows and stuff.
It's just really blurry, and therefore not really useful :/

 

[0ddity]

What kind of TV? If it's a CRT, you should use 800x600 or 1024x768, if its an LCD or plasma, you should find out the native resolution of that TV and run it at that. If it's an HDTV, your old video card might not be capable of displaying resolutions high enough.

 

[tijntje_7]

It's old. And iirc CRT is the tv that sticks out half a meter right?
It's not plasma or lcd though.
I have used both those resolutions... They're blurry. A lot

(like every resolution I have tried)

 

[0ddity]

yeah, CRT are the old school fat TV's. Most are not compatible with resolutions higher then 1024x768. Back in the day I used s-video to hook up an old TV to my computer for playing games, and I found that's pretty much all it's good for. The resolution on CRT TV's just isn't high enough to display text or sharp lines crisply, so I think your problem is just a limitation of your TV, because the pixels on those TV's are a lot bigger than on computer monitors, and they're usually not round either, they're portrait oriented rectangles.

 

[tijntje_7]

Hmm.
I tried something to check if it's a software or hardware related...

I played a dvd from my ps2 to my tv.
Then, I played the same dvd from my computer to my tv.
The quality from the ps2 was definately better :/
Weird stuff
(the dvd was spongebob the movie

)

 

[Originality]

This reminds me about the difference between bitmaps and vectors. Vectors scale well to size. Bitmaps don't. A computer relies too much on pixels for definition viewed at a close range, whilst a CRT TV is designed to be viewed from a distance (where you can't see how fuzzy it actually is). More than that, SCART can't actually carry a high definition signal (the difference between Composite and Component - 3 or 5 wires).

It's one of the reasons they say watching TV makes your eyes go square (based on the statistics of people who watch a lot of TV and end up in glasses, although that was originally a myth but ended up self-fulfilling).

Even now it's terrible trying to surf the net on my 42" TV using my laptop via HDMI. Sure it can display every pixel, but no matter what resolution I use, it's either too small or too big to read the text in web browsers clearly.