Playstation 2

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Why is the quality so bad? How can I improve it? (lemmy.world)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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All PS2 games look really blurry on Panasonic Viera TV.

For comparison, when I play the Jak trilogy on PS5 (which is just the PS2 ports), it has a sharp and crisp image. But the same games on an actual PS2 are much lower quality. This leads me to think there's some scaling issue that the PS5 automatically fixes since I don't think they remastered it or anything. And the same applies to every PS2 game.

It's currently connected via RCA component cables, and I tried messing with the game mode settings on the TV but it didn't really do anything noticeable. I'm wondering if I should buy a PS2 to HDMI converter or if that might be even worse than the current set up. I don't have much money I can spend but if I need to I will, just whatever it takes to get it looking good. It looks like sh*

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Not sure about your setup but just thought you should remember that the PS2 was primarily designed to be used with CRT TVs and they were blurry as hell. Game designers of that era expected it and even designed their in-game-assets around that e.g. jagged edges in low poly art got blurred into smooth curves.

PC emulators are even adding CRT filters to make games look more true to the intended vision.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (2 children)

Just want to add on clarification that this doesn't mean "they look bad because everything looked bad back then", but rather, they were designed to look good^1 on CRT displays because the graphics people were used to working with CRT artifacts, so when different display technologies arrived that didn't behave the same, the CRT-targeted graphics didn't look as good as they were meant to.

It basically came down to pixels bleeding into neighboring pixels in a way that created gradients between pixels. So while the pixels themselves were still limited to the ridiculously low resolutions of CRT TVs (which basically didn't change since broadcast TV was a thing), they could simulate a higher resolution for the shading with those subpixel gradients.

Though note that this "good" is still relative to how good things were able to look at the time. The resolution is still way under what you're used to today.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

Spot on, thanks for clarifying!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

I wouldn't call 480p rediculously low resolution. It was fine. Shows in the 80s and 90s are crisp. It's more to do with the camera recording the show. Shows from the 1950s and shows from the 1990s are the same resolution in broadcast, but I don't think the 1950s shows were recorded at 480p, so obviously not broadcast as a true 480p.

I know, you're probably comparing it to a 96 inch 8k tv. You just gotta remember, TVs not only had a different resolution than today, they also had a different broadcast format. 4:3 as opposed to todays 16:9. AND the TVs were generally smaller. We had a 19 inch for 20 years. Still have it. Still works. Made in the 80s. It's just with current standards changing, and input methods changing, it's a little silly to hook an HDMI into a component converter, just to convert it again to composit, to connect your PS5 to a TV made in 1982.

Times change.......but 480p was great for it's time.