Fun with LCD TV's and game consoles

[BlackFurredBeast]

I know this is more of a fringe topic, but I don't know where else to get help on the fly...

I'm in Germany, so if you happen to know a little about european TV standards, so much for the better :-)

So, my wife's parents got generous all of a sudden and got us a nice 27" LCD TV for Christmas. I was all "Yay!" until I actually plugged in my consoles.

Previously, I had the following setup:
Moderatly cheap "traditional" TV, PS2, Xbox, Cube, Dreamcast, all routed through a SCART switchbox. The picture was rock solid, I could use 60Hz mode all the time. Crisp picture, solid colors, on any console.

Now, I just thought "no sweat", jacked the master plug from the switchbox into the LCD TV and my jaw dropped - in horror. I had Project Gotham Racing 2 for the Xbox running, and the Ferrari in the start screen, usually bold red, looked puke-yellow. The picture was muddy, looked somewhat "dirty" and all, the text was all leaky-edged. Very strange, since the "pure" TV signal came across pretty sweet too.
I soon discovered that the LCD TV couldn't "understand" the PAL60 signal the Xbox was set up to send, so I turned down to PAL50, and took the resulting hit in picture quality. But the colors got all good, at least.
I checked the PS2. Here it was a little less worse, although Onimusha 3 and Armored Core 3 went all muddy on me too.
Lastly I checked the Cube, Soul Calibur 2. 60Hz was out (I took my lessons from the Xbox), but the picture quality was horrendous. It looked worse than a PSOne with RF Unit (trust me, I had one, before upgrading to better wires and a better TV ages back).

So, now before I go out and blow 50 to 60 Euros on new cables: Any ideas on how to improve the picture quality? The TV is supposedly able to display 1080p, has TONS of component/S-Video inputs (it's also able to display up to 1284*1024@60Hz)
And IF I have to go out and buy new cables: I try to avoid having to unplug/replug all the consoles all the time. I have 2 SCART inputs, one S-Video, one 5-part component, one D-sub/VGA and the usual RF ins, so what cables should I get for which console?

[Hi Ho]

LCD's have a native resolution, that is a fixed resolution. In your case, appearently, the TV has a native resolution of 1280x1024. The problem with this is that when you have a signal that is anything other than the native resolution the TV must scale it up or down in order to make it fit the screen.

From your PS2 and Gamecube, you are getting 480p at best (640x480). The TV must scale that up to 1280x1024. This makes a fuzzy image.

The Xbox has the ability to do HD resolution (1280x720) and if you set it up that way you would get much better picture quality.

[BlackFurredBeast]

I just noticed that the SCART switchbox my systems ran through did indeed mess up the signal. In all three instances, the picture quality got markedly better, although nowhere near as good as on my old set.

Now, what remains to be found is how I set my european Xbox to HD mode. I tried fiddling with the settings, but the only choices I had was between wide-screen or 4:3 and if I wanted to use PAL60 or not. Do I need special wires for that to "unlock" this functionality?

Edit: I just googled around and found out that German Xboxes are not meant to put out HD signals - at least not without modding/soft-modding...

[RJ]

although nowhere near as good as on my old set.

You can't achive that quality with an LCD TV due to the scaling issue. Especially not with the crappy ones that you can get here in Germany. They have resolutions that you will never use, all images have to be scaled, which makes the image blurry. Very very few have a 720p resolution, then you will get a very good picture with the XBox. Though I can't tell you how, as I don't know the settings of the XBox.
And even though RGB mode is the best, some TVs don't handle RGB properly, so you might even want to use S-Video or Composite.

RJ

[BlackFurredBeast]

I noticed. The Xbox Widescreen option should be exactly 16:9, but the picture is still a little flattened, even when I force the TV to use 16:9 instead of auto-adjust. And as I said, the TV doesn't even support PAL60. So I'd better go and get good (component) cables for my consoles to make the best out of this situation. Sigh. I don't want to have to park two TV's in our living room, just for playing.