It looks awful when I Wii on my LCD.

TetraNitroCubane

First of all, obligatory Wii joke, lol. I know, I know, we're over that by now, but it's an attention getter.

Anyway, I've had a Wii since about February, but since I live in a very tiny apartment, I have no huge amount of room nor money for an exorbitantly large TV. Since I also have a 360 that I play quite regularly, I went ahead and bought an LCD monitor that I thought I might be able to use for both systems fairly transparently. I got ahold of a Samsung 215TW. It's not the greatest LCD in the world, I know, but it looks damned fine to my untrained eye when I'm playing the 360 or using it with my PC. Of course, that's all over VGA. The Wii doesn't have VGA support native, so I figured that I might get a picture that looks OK using component cables to plug directly into the LCD (The 215Tw has component and composite inputs, as well as Analog VGA, and DVI).

The thing is, everything looks super-jaggy when I'm playing the Wii. Sometimes colors look washed out, and I've never seen a single smooth edge outside of playing Super Paper Mario. Using composite looks even worse!

So I'm wondering what's up here? Is it just that the Wii looks like ass over component? Or (as I suspect), is it that the 215TW just isn't made with correct component inputs? If it's a problem with the monitor, can anyone suggest a reasonable solution to piping the Wii display over VGA or DVI?

Thanks, I appreciate any help.

Big Dookie

This may be a dumb question, but do you have the Wii set to 480p? If not, that may be part of the problem.

If so, keep in mind that the highest resolution the Wii can go is 480p. Things will look smoother in terms of motion and colors and stuff, but the "jaggies" will be more noticeable since it is in progressive scan. Just a thought.

TetraNitroCubane

Big Dookie wrote: »

This may be a dumb question, but do you have the Wii set to 480p? If not, that may be part of the problem.

If so, keep in mind that the highest resolution the Wii can go is 480p. Things will look smoother in terms of motion and colors and stuff, but the "jaggies" will be more noticeable since it is in progressive scan. Just a thought.

Nah, it's not a dumb question. I checked, and the Wii is set to run in 480p. The monitor confirms that it's running in that resolution, too. I hadn't thought about jaggies being more noticeable just because of the progressive scan, though. I guess I also thought there was some degree of AA on the Wii? I could be wrong there.

khain

Thats pretty much what certain Wii games look like.

FirstComradeStalin

What other games outside of SPM are you playing on your Wii?

TetraNitroCubane

FirstComradeStalin wrote: »

What other games outside of SPM are you playing on your Wii?

Zelda, Resident Evil 4, and more recently Zack and Wiki.

It's pretty noticeable when I play Zelda, and though Zack and Wiki is jaggy it's not terrible... But Resident Evil 4 gets downright confusing it looks so bad in some places. I remember that game being lauded for it's graphics, so that makes me think there's something fishy going on...

Edit: Now that I think back, Wii sports didn't actually look too bad compared to all of those other games.

vonPoonBurGer

Your Wii is putting out a 480p signal (720x480). Your display's native resolution is 1680x1050 @ up to 75 Hz. In order for a 480p image to display on your monitor, the hardware inside the unit has to convert it to to the native resolution of the panel. Oddly enough, when you scale 480 pixels worth of information up to 1050 pixels, it tends to look like crap. Your Xbox 360's picture probably looks better because it's actually being scaled down from 1080i (1920x1080) to your display's native resolution, and keeping visual quality while scaling down is a lot easier than doing the same while scaling up. It's going to be more noticeable in some games compared to others, depending on how much visual information is packed into the original image.

Display manufacturers can add filtering and converting hardware in order to improve the visual quality of upscaled material, but that costs money. Much like anything else in this world, when selecting conversion hardware for the internals of an LCD panel, manufacturers get to choose two of "fast", "cheap" and "high quality". "Fast" has to be one of their choices, because otherwise the hardware can't keep up with the refresh rate of the signal and frames get dropped. In terms of video, dropped frames are an even greater sin than blocky pixels, so really their choice is between "Cheap" and "High Quality". Manufacturers of LCD displays designed to be computer monitors generally choose "cheap" in order to be cost-competitive in the computer monitor market. Manufacturers of LCD TVs usually choose "high quality" in order to make sure their products compare well to alternate display types (e.g. plasma TVs). However, if you see an LCD TV at a super-cheap price, chances are it's got cheap conversion hardware, and you'll notice it when you try to watch any 480i or 480p content (a.k.a. standard TV and progressive scan content). I always cringe when I see someone asking in H&A if they should buy an LCD monitor to use as a TV, because those savings do come at a price, and that price is image quality in upscaled content.

What you might be able to do in order to work around this problem is offload upconversion to some other device. The downside is that any device that can do the upconversion with decent quality is also likely to be expensive (e.g. an upconverting AV receiver). If your video card supports component in, however, you may be able to get your computer to do it. Your system probably has enough horsepower to do the conversion with better quality, and you've already paid for it. On the flip side, I've heard this can introduce some visual latency, i.e. the picture will show up on the screen several milliseconds later than if you plugged the Wii directly into your LCD. It's not huge, but it can be enough to throw you off in games that require precise timing. Also, it's not exactly a simple plug 'n go deal. I haven't done it myself, but I hear it involves using software like DScaler to receive, upconvert and pump back out the source signal. Might be worth investigating.

robotbebop

You may be able to alleviate jaggies by choosing a softness setting in your TV's options. I had my 19" LCD set to Sharpest and it was jaggy; once I set it back to soft, softer or softest, it looked a lot more natural. Doesn't make too much of a difference playing games on my 360 but it definitely helps with DVDs since the 360 drops down to 480 for them.