Parhelia, poor TV output?

[Flying dutchman]

Please, guys, stop bashing each other's skulls. And stop making assumptions about each other, I have no reason to doubt the sincerity and professionality of any of the beta testers.

The card that CT tested in Issue 14/2002 is the STANDARD version of the card, and they further specify it as having : 128 mb memory, 3.3 ns DDR-Ram, 220 MHz chip clock, 275 MHz memory clock, bundled with DV-i to VGA plus DV-i to 2x VGA adapter, VGA to composite & S-video adapter. Software bundled was a Photoshop plug-in, Gigacolor Viewer, Color calibration. Priced at 480 Euro.

I don't wish to add fuel to the fire, but I have yet to find a more professional and in-depth magazine than Ct. I myself, being a software engineer, have bought every single issue since 1990 and not regretted a single one of them. They are the standard against which I measure all other magazines, including the ones from the other side of the pond. And I do buy a terrible lot of reading stuff each month (being a pentalingual technology freak).
If the Ct guys test a piece of hardware, they really test it to the smoking bone, rely on that. In the same issue a well-known motherboard manufacturer took a beating because his mobo produced a single-bit error in a 16-hours stability test.

I'd like to remark that PAL has a higher-frequency color burst (4.3 Mhz) than NTSC. So there's no reason at all to cutoff composite luminance at 2.3 Mhz (sorry for the mis-quote of 2.4). Unless the card is multi-standard, and the low-pass filtering is done to accomodate NTSC users?

I quote about the VGA signal quality:

"Up to 1280-er resolutions, the Parhelia achieved very good results indeed in the VGA test. At the 1600x1200 resolution at 85 Hz however, which is the relevant one for its rating in this test, it does not do any better than most competing products. At least the Matrox delivers identical quality on the first and second output"

[miya]

By resorting to insults, you only make your opposition look better. So he called you groupies, get over it. He also makes some very good points, and was never really refuted properly. If you have professional test equipement, lets see some numbers. A side by side comparison with a G400/450, or perhaps even an ATI or Nvidia.

These comments about image quality are making me nervous, and I've seen nothing but subjective opinions (of people that I know love Matrox as much as I do) to refute them.

[xortam]

I have no problems with a collective subjective opinion by critical eyes when doing a proper A/B comparison. I worry that analysis of test equipment results doesn't match what looks good to my eye. I haven't looked into the C't report much due to the language barrier but I'm getting around to "Babble Fishing" the text and I've seen the Matrox graphs. I'm hoping the text will explain to me how I should interpret the graphs but it gives me an uneasy feeling versus good subjective opinions. How well established are these analytical tests?

[Indiana]

The whole thing reminds me a bit about the Radeon8500:
After it was out there were some/few small voices claiming the IQ had become worse from the old Radeon.
Of course they took a major bashing by ATI supporters, claiming the R8500 with it's 400MHz RamDAC having excellent signal quality.
Guess what: I have both, the old RadeonVIVO and the Radeon8500 and the 8500's signal is in fact a bit worse.

So to me, seeing similar threads regarding the Parhelia really doesn't sound good. And none refuted the 2.3MHz thing, there were just some inappropriate claims about NTSC signals. Noone in Europe cares about NTSC, we want good quality PAL, that sometimes seems to be neglected by Matrox (think e.g. of the DVDMax stuttering issues of the G400 in PAL systems).

Unfortunately it's not only Matrox, but ATI as well. There were quite some problems with "hum" in the PAL versions of their AIW cards that up to now have not fully been solved.

[xortam]

Update.