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Just bought a Pentium II Dell Inspiron 7000 laptop. What is an easy way to hookup the s-video to a CRT TV?

computerdude92

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Dec 10, 2014
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Hello,

The Dell hasn't shipped yet, but I want to know how to hook up the 7-pin s-video to my CRT TV set. Does anyone here have experience with this particular Dell laptop or a similar model?

I saw a cable on Ebay that will convert 7-pin s-video to RCA. That looks like my favorite idea to try, because some of my CRT TVs only have RCA. Do you know if this cable will work?


Thanks.
 
It's been a long time since I tried but the big caveat is you need to make sure the video driver is correctly setup or it won't let you use the Video Out port.
 
I will be running Windows 95 OSR 2.5. It's my favorite retro OS besides XP. So hopefully the Win98 video drivers will work like a charm.
 
because some of my CRT TVs only have RCA.
Then choose a TV that has s-video..? Picture quality over RCA is so bad it won't really let you do much. Also, these cheap adapter cables just short the chroma and luma pins. This will shift colors and is not the correct way to do it.
 
Don't forget that in North America it took an unacceptably long time before even composite video became standard on TV sets. S-video through the 90's remained a premium option only found on the larger high end sets.
 
I remember having an SiS graphics card with 8mb video ram and it had a yellow RCA on it. It looked awesome on the CRT TV I had at the time because the pixels on my games were so perfectly shaded. I noticed no difference in color. Many Windows 9x games don't need high resolution and they looked perfectly pixel shaded at 640x480 when displayed on the TV. I'd rather game on a CRT TV than a computer CRT.

Composite video is the same thing as RCA right? My apparent budget model 1995 GE TV set I showed on this forum months ago has this port. I wasn't an adult back in the millennial era, but it looks like by the mid 90's, RCA was common on CRT TVs.

How bad does the color shift look? What is the best adapter or cable to use?
 
Long time ago I owned an Inspiron 8100 with XP and an Nvidia video card, it came with this adapter: https://www.svideo.com/7pinwspdif.html

Ha, that was a great computer. It had modular bays for floppy drivers or an extra battery...

I used the video out to watch DVDs but the quality wasn't that great.. and you needed the correct drivers and mess around in the settings to get it going.

Don't know about NTSC land, but in Europe most TVs after Y2k could S-Video. I also don't know if there's quality differences between Dell adapters and aftermarket ones
 
Hey... I just clicked your link and I see that my Dell Inspiron 7000 is on the list. Thank you! I'm saved... ;)
 
That website wants to charge like $40 for ground shipping to AK! So instead I just bought it from Ebay for less than $5 with free shipping.

The s-video website oddly does not list the Dell part number... This CN-044CTV cable I bought must be the same cable. I don't see any other model.

Thanks again!
 
Impressive that you can get something shipped for free to Alaska... I hope it works and for $5 it doesn't hurt to try anyway!
 
Composite video is the same thing as RCA right? My apparent budget model 1995 GE TV set I showed on this forum months ago has this port. I wasn't an adult back in the millennial era, but it looks like by the mid 90's, RCA was common on CRT TVs.

CVBS is a video standard, RCA is a connector standard, they are not the same. RCA cables can carry many different types of signal, both video and audio. RCA connectors predate CVBS by 20+ years, being invented in the 1930s for radio. CVBS wasn't around until the mid 1950s.

How bad does the color shift look? What is the best adapter or cable to use?

CBVS over RCA multiplexes the chroma and luma channels and causes significant image degradation because CVBS doesn't have enough bandwidth to represent the full data stream of both. This is why people used S-Video, it keeps the chroma and luma separate and results in a much sharper image.

I have a 1992 Sony CRT with S-Video, and the difference is night and day when using S-Video vs CVBS.
 
Fun fact: Atari and Commodore had Y/C video outputs in their home computers before it became an official standard in the late 80s. And yes, the picture quality is noticeably better than CVBS and only marginally worse than RGB.
 
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