Cable TV image ghosting :: semicomplete.com

Wed, 09 Aug 2006

Cable TV image ghosting

This isn't particularly software-related, but I figured I'd note it anway.

I noticed yesterday that despite having a decent TV connected to a digital cable box, that the image was still ghosted, presumably due to noise. Moving cables around didn't fix the problem, but in the process I noticed composite video output on the cable box. I took a shot that using composite would produce better quality signal and plugged an RCA AV cable in. Viola! Ghosting went away, and the picture is much less blurry. I wouldn't have expected coax to be more susceptible to noise, but perhaps the circuitry modulating the coax signal was picking up noise that the composite video circuitry was not.

Problem solved.

Comments: 5 (view comments)
Tags: tv
Permalink: /misc/cablebox-fix
posted at: 15:04

5 responses to 'Cable TV image ghosting'

Ryan posted at Sun Aug 13 16:48:45 2006...

Ha! Found your blog. Anyway, yeah, composite is sooo much better. I'm using RCA right now on my DVD player and the blur is so bad that when watching Blue Man Group, their faces are completely blue, no eyes, nothing. So I'm off to buy a composite cable today!

Adam posted at Mon Aug 14 08:32:29 2006...

Isn't RCA the same thing as composite? Are you using component?

Jordan Sissel posted at Mon Aug 14 10:09:16 2006...

Well, RCA is the kind of connector, iirc.

I'm using composite, not component. Composite is the yellow, single RCA connector. Component is the red/green/blue 3 RCA connector set.

Component does HD, composite does not.

What I was musing over was the fact that composite (yellow) had clearer picture than coax cable. Perhaps there's just more signal bleed or noise reception with coax or the signal it uses.

I'm hoping to upgrade to an HD cable box soon, but that's a bit down the road.

Alex Cook posted at Tue Nov 7 12:25:28 2006...

You SUCK!!

Jordan Sissel posted at Tue Nov 7 16:21:08 2006...

Sweet!

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