Some of you already know Wayne sent me one of his Bybee S-Video Adapters to demo, and I'm sure some of you don't know that.
If you don't care for reading much, I'll mention right now that it didn't get sent back to Wayne. It's staying right here in Seattle...
Wayne sent me the S-Vid Adapter along with my Napalm Ultra towards the end of September. I didn't test it out at the time as it'd not been burned in yet.
So I burned it in for a good 600+ hours before I a/b'd it in my setup. I tried it on both LD's & PAL DVD's. It made more of a difference on the PAL DVD's than it did on LD's. That didn't really surprise me as the LD player is a $4K machine, and the DVDP is a 3 1/2 year old $250 machine. Not to mention that particular LD player is about the cleanest S-Video source you can find.
The improvement very much reminded me of going from Composite to S-Video. Colors were improved, and fine detail was improved. It made subtitles & on screen text easier to read.
I thought the S-Video ouput of my LD player wasn't going to get much better as the source was very clean to begin with, and I'm also using the highest quality S-Vid cable I've found. But, there was still some room for improvement. Even on my 32" Toshiba Cinema Series display.
I also brought it over to a friends place as I wanted to see what it did with the same LD player, but on a much larger screen. He's running a Runco IDP 980 CRT projector w/a Farouja line quadrupler on an 8' 16:9 Stewart screen.
It did the same stuff on his setup that it did on mine. Though it made a much bigger difference on his setup as his screen is much bigger than mine. And it also helped something which I wasn't expecting on his setup. It reduced the artifacts from the line qaudrupler. And it did so to a good degree. I don't know what I liked better on his setup, the increased detail, or the lessening of motion artifacts. Not that I had to choose one or the other. But they were both very welcome picture quality gains.
So on my setup the Bybee S-Video adapter was the "finishing touch" for my S-Video source.
But on a much larger display, the improvements gained were much more than "finishing touches". As it's much harder to get a good picture on a good sized front projection setup, you need to squeeze everything you can out of your video setup. And the Bybee S-Video adapter squeezes quite a good amount out of your setup that you didn't think was there for the squeezing.
So for my particular setup, it gave me that little extra. But in my friends setup, it was almost required.
Needless to say, he wouldn't let me leave his house with the S-Video Adapter.
Wayne, thanks again for letting me demo the adapter. I wanted to know what it'd do, and now I know.
