Sega-Naomi

Not sure if this really belongs here or in Other Tech, but...



Any of you guys have any experience with video scalers/frame doublers? I'm thinking of running one from the Naomi to my LCD panel in order to scale up the 640x480 to the LCD's native resolution of 1280x1024. I figure an external scaler will probably do a better job than the built-in one. Trying to get some recommendations on brands, etc. Any and all comments are welcome!

In my opinion, I don't think an external scaler is going to do any better than what you already have.

Also, the scaler inside the monitor is matched to LCD electronics! So I doubt you will get better than that.

Video scalers tend to be real expensive. I'm talking 3 digits. :smt078 :smt107

Yeah, the ones I was looking at are for VGA only and run $200-400. I thought because they were expensive they'd do a better job than the monitor. The monitor doesn't look bad--actually, hi-res games look pretty good. It just has some odd jaggies from the scaling. The low res sprites in Capcom and SNK fighters look pretty awful though. They look much better on my 13" RGB CRT monitor. The LCD was the top of the line Planar monitor when I bought it a couple years ago. Hmm, what to do...



P.S. - What part of Jersey are you in?

I'm in North Arlington (near Newark).

Eh budder bing!

RGP wrote:Eh budder bing!

Oh, nice. :smt018

joshua3dg wrote:In my opinion, I don't think an external scaler is going to do any better than what you already have.

Also, the scaler inside the monitor is matched to LCD electronics! So I doubt you will get better than that.

Video scalers tend to be real expensive. I'm talking 3 digits. :smt078 :smt107

Not entirely true.



The VGA signal from the Naomi will be at 640x480, and will be displayed as such on the LCD. The panel will not upscale the picture to the max resolution available. An external scaler will upscale the 640x480 upto it's maximum (supported by the scaler) and then display it on the monitor at the upscaled resolution.



That's why people buy them for their DVD players to upscale to 1080i for their HD panels

dj_johnnyg wrote:

joshua3dg wrote:In my opinion, I don't think an external scaler is going to do any better than what you already have.

Also, the scaler inside the monitor is matched to LCD electronics! So I doubt you will get better than that.

Video scalers tend to be real expensive. I'm talking 3 digits. :smt078 :smt107

Not entirely true.



The VGA signal from the Naomi will be at 640x480, and will be displayed as such on the LCD. The panel will not upscale the picture to the max resolution available. An external scaler will upscale the 640x480 upto it's maximum (supported by the scaler) and then display it on the monitor at the upscaled resolution.



That's why people buy them for their DVD players to upscale to 1080i for their HD panels

Hmm. :smt017 Actually, LCDs have a fixed pixel size, so they are only able to display at their native resolution. An LCD panel will always scale the image up or down to fit that size. So the only way to avoid using the internal scaler is by matching your input to the LCDs native resolution. In my case this happens to be 1280x1024. (This differs from how a CRT operates.) Hence my interest in using an external scaler, since I've heard that most LCDs do a piss-poor job of the scaling process.

I agree with Brumma. Scaling on a LCD is different than scaling on CRT's.

The thing is.



I agree that there is a fixed pixel size on LCD screens, but when you send a 640x480 VGA signal to a 1280x1024 capable monitor, the image is still only 640x480. It fills the screen because the internal "scaler" uses multiple pixels to display each pixel of data.



A Simple example would be a monitor that displays 4x4 pixels being fed a 4x4 signal. Each pixel on the monitor is mapped to the pixel of signal. But if you feed the same monitor a 2x2 signal, the image still fills the screen, but each data pixel is represented by 4 display pixels.



By using an external scaler, you can upscale the 640x480 image data to 1280x1024.



By the way, are you sure the monitors native resolution is 1280x1024, and not just the max supported resolution?



My Plasma is capable of 1080i, but only has a native resolution of 1024x768.