Why are my component cables showing worse quality than the composite yellow video cable?

Question

I have an old Panasonic DVD player back from 2002 (interlace scan...I believe). I plugged in my component cables to my Samsung HDTV and compared it to the standard yellow video cables and it is showing worse quality. I know that component are suppose to be better, are there some hidden settings that I should know about?

Answer 1

alot of component cables that come shipped with products are very, very cheaply made.

Answer 2

Make sure that you are matching up all the colors, i.e. not connecting Component cables to Composite ports. But some Component cables may be made cheaply. If you get a better picture with the Composite cable, then you should use that instead.

Answer 3

Often - each input to the TV has separate brightness, contrast, color balance settings. I suspect your component inputs are set differently than your composite input and you perceive this to be wrong.

Use a disk with THX Optmizer to adjust the component settings or a setup DVD like Digital Video Essentials.

Pause a screen from the movie "Cars" with lots of bright colors and straight lines.  Toggle between the composite and component feeds. The component feed should show a reduction in dot-crawl on straight lines and the colors should remain solid while the composite input should have the colors fade a bit as they get to the edges.

Answer 4

Make sure the DVD output and the TV are set the same.

If your DVD is set to output 480i over componet cables your picture quality will not be much better.

use the higher of 480p, 720i, 720p or 1080i.