Sega Saturn S-video cables

[Zorator]

So these are suddenly available everywhere again, but a lot of the cheaper ones on eBay show three TV plugs(red, white, and yellow) whereas the ones Racketboy sells only have two(red and white). What's the difference? Are the three plugged version, which are apparently gold plated, any better or worse than the slightly more expensive two plug cables?

[mickcris]

I think all the ones that have the composite connection also are made by Retrobit. I bought some NES extension cables made by them that were extremely shoddy. Not sure if their a/v cables are any different than their controller cables.

[EmperorIng]

I bought one of those cheap S-Video cables off of ebay (retro-bit? not sure). No complaints! Everything worked very well for me and my saturn; the picture quality improved drastically.

The one I bought had the 3 red-yellow-white cables + the s-video cable, so that's the only one I have experience with.

[Zorator]

Hmm interesting. I'm sure any S-video will be an improvement over the standard RF connector I'm using now but I'm curious if there's any real difference because one of the eBay sellers with the more expensive two plugged cable also has some other hardware I need, and I noticed that the official Sega cables also only have the red and white plugs. Obviously they are still third party and not gonna be as good as the Sega cables but since they appear to be more like the official ones it may be indicative of something.

[Ed Oscuro]

It took me a long time to realize it, but you don't gain anything by plugging in the yellow cable when you have s-video. That yellow cable is for composite video, which will be ignored by the TV when you've got a S-Video connection. Unless you want to have both options available on the same cord, don't worry about getting the yellow cable - but I think what's just as important is the knowledge that you don't have to plug it in. It might even be a good idea for quality purposes not to plug it in (though I don't have any data on this, just a strong hunch that the voltages going over composite don't completely dissipate into the ether inside the TV).

Gold plate is another thing entirely - I think the only real reason to get that for video is to prevent metal mismatch corrosion, or corrosion / tarnishing / whatever in the cable itself, but I doubt that is going to be a problem on any recent TVs anyway. Of course, gold doesn't wear as well as the usual metals, so there's tradeoffs either way - but really minor ones.

[BazookaBen]

The thing you have to always watch out for with S-video cables is that some cheap ones aren't actually S-video. They're just the composite signal rewired through the s-video pins, making the picture total crap.

That said, when you do land a true s-video cable, the picture quality is really close to RGB. Honestly, I have a hard time telling a difference between RGB and S-video coming from my gaming systems. The only reason I use RGB is because it's theoretically the best. If somebody went behind my monitor and plugged everything up with s-video, I don't think I would notice.

[Ed Oscuro]

Depends on the game - text (even in a game like Super Metroid) looks much better than composite, but there's still some notable artifacts going on. Really depends on the game and what content it's showing at the moment.

Never run into fake S-Video cables, though I guess it could happen.