Questions about the TV out on the G550

[fatbandito]

I'm thinking about buying my 1st Matrox card, a G550. I need the best possible 2D on a <$100 card and have read that the the 550 is very good, but I was also wondering about the TV out. Does this card have a good TV encoder, and is it easy to make adjustments to eliminate TV overscan? I'd like to use this to output some non-region 1 DVDs from my pc to TV, the nvidia I have now works fairly well but I'd like better, and the 2D quality of the nvidia leaves a lot to be desired.

Also, I saw that newegg has the G550 for $95 and was wondering if this is a good price, I wasn't sure who the favorite online seller of matrox cards is. Thanks for any info.

[dZeus]

The G400 and up have a dualhead mode called 'DVD-MAX', in which all video material is outputted in full overscan to the TV. No need to make any adjustments. TV quality is really good on Matrox cards in general.

[WayneHu]

Recently I just tested a Matrox G550 and Hercules Radeon 8500LE 128MB.

Matrox G550: $91 (no tax free shipping)
Radeon 8500LE: $99.95+tax (from Fry's Electronics)

Both of their DVI-I outputs at 1280x1024 60 Hz are excellent. In my personal feeling, the color saturation/contrast of G550's DVI output is better than Hercules Radeon 8500's. The Monitor is Sceptre X9g, which can output the similar color as a good TrinitronFD or DiamondtronNF monitor after some adjustments. Somehow G550's DVI-I cannot output 640x480 60Hz signal correctly to this LCD monitor, but Radeon 8500LE can. I have sent this issue to Matrox and hope can get an answer from him next week.

The TV output of Hercules' is also good. However, if it is just the Good quality, then G550's TV out quality must be Excellent. The compared factors include Color contrast, Color vividness, and Text crispness. The output is Panasonic Tau 27" via Monster 4m S-Video cable. The TV-out adjustment on G550 cannot affect the DVDMax mode output. Only the Zoom mode can be affected. I am not sure if it is a bug inside the driver or the hardware limitation. Probably this issue had been discussed before.

The secondary D-sub output of G550 is still good. But it is not as great as the primary output. Instead, the Hercules' secondary output is bad. If 2D DualHead output is your main concern, I think you had better stay with G550. If you want the secondary output is as great as the primary display, I think you have no choice but buy a Parhelia. Otherwise, you have to use dual DVI-I graphics card and the two DVI LCD monitors.

The Hercules Radeon 8500LE's TV-out provides the same feature as Matrox G400DH. Under the Text VGA mode, the signal is also output to the TV-out port. If you use G550, there is no such feature.

If your machine is the long term online one, I can just suggest Matrox or nVidia's adapter. I have had a good experience with Matrox G200/G400 and also nVidia GF4 MX420SD. None of them requires a fan on the heat sink. As I know, ATi's old driver often causes some kinds of BSOD or GPF after certain use although it has seemed to be improved a lot.

[dZeus]

wether you should be able to change overscan compensation in DVD-MAX mode is not a question about hardware or driver limitation imho, but about the desireable functionality.

Almost all video content is optimized for broadcast onto televisions, which have overscan. If they are somehow not 'compatible' with overscan because someone made a silly mistake of hardcoding subtitles into the overscan area of the video stream, then the problem should not be corrected by adding support for 'silly streams' to the DVD-MAX properties. Instead, you should play back the faulty stream with a software filter like DivXG400, which can add black borders around the stream.

In all other mode, where the monitor's desktop is cloned/outputted to tv-out, overscan compensation does make sense, because the desktop (or games for example) are _not_ meant to be outputted to overscan devices, like television sets. (unless they are 100% ported from game consoles that output in overscan ). In these situations you can change all the overscan compensation you want with the matrox drivers.

[fatbandito]

Thanks dZeus and Wayne for all the information, I think I will go with the G550. Do 550 users view a noticable improvement over the 450 in 2D or TV out? I was just noticing the $2o difference in the 2 cards, I don't really need the headcasting or dvi out features, I will be using the card mostly to run an NEC 1700V analog 17" LCD and for the TV out.

[WayneHu]

It is not quite convenient to use DivxG400 filter to get the adjustment. If the adjustment can be provided by the driver, the possible compatibility issue can be eliminated.

Yesterday I tried another shorter S-Video cable, and found Radeon 8500 TV-out becomes better. It really surprises me. So does G550's. It becomes even sharper than before. Thus it is very important to pick the good quality long length cable if you have such requirement.

Although G550's Win2k driver 5.84 provides TV adjustment function, I found the DVDMax cannot output anything after the machine's uptime had reached 1 or 2 days. I have to reboot the system to make it work again. Before I tried 5.72, 5.82 on G400DH, and there was no such problem with more than 10 day's uptime. Thus I have changed the driver back to 5.72 to see what will happen.

The Radeon 8500's VGA Text mode output always gets a synchronized TV port output when the monitor is connected to the secondary output. Unfortunately, it also makes the win2k driver to pick up the low resolution automatically which can be also output to the TV. But I haven't tried the case when the monitor is connected to the primary output. For this behavior, I cannot compare it with G400 because it seems G400DH cannot have secondary output on monitor and TV at the same time.

[fatbandito]

Wayne, I had planned on using a 30' S cable, guess I better relocate my TV. Is the G550 still available at the price you mentioned above, $91 (no tax free shipping) ?

[xortam]

You might want to consider splitting out the Y/C connectors to use two long coax runs to maintain your signal quality.

[WayneHu]

Originally posted by fatbandito
Wayne, I had planned on using a 30' S cable, guess I better relocate my TV. Is the G550 still available at the price you mentioned above, $91 (no tax free shipping) ?

You can find it via the Price Watch.

http://www.acmicro.com/PPMain.asp?sg=1&gr=2&it=4&si=3

But this OEM bulk package does not include TV-out cable and DVI-I to HDB-15 converter. (I have aldready had TV-out cable, and I don't need the DVI-I to HDB-15 converter.) If you buy these two items separately, there will not be any price difference between the OEM and Retail package. Thus it is still better to buy a retail package with everything that you need.

Here I have to apologize that I gave you some misleading information. I suddenly found the TV's front S-Video port performs better than the rear one instead of the factor of the different cable. However, G550's TV-out quality is still good although there is a lot of signal degradation via the TV's real S-Video port.