Displaying composite and RGB on a Commodore 1084S-P2

[boggit]

Hey everyone!

Yesterday, I purchased a Commodore 1084s-P2 monitor, hoping to be able to use it with my C64 as well as with my CGA-based IBM 5160/XT system.

Unfortunately, the screen I got seems to be one of the later, cost-reduced variants that lacks the option for digital RGB, only offering the analogue RGB that the Amiga would use.

See ports here:


Question 1: Say I would use a digital-to-analogue converter, such as this one, would the output quality on screen be noticably worse than it would have been if the monitor had accepted digital RGB natively, as it were?

I managed to get excellent picture on the screen when connecting my Commodore 64 via S-Video. I'm using a converter that goes from the port on the C64 and diverges into three RCA connectors. Sound was definitely decent as well, though only coming out of the left speaker (using a converter that connects to the C64 port and then splits up into three RCA connectors, with only one for (mono)sound). However, when hooking up the CGA-equipped XT system to the monitor via composite cable -> PAL/NTSC converter -> composite cable (to the bottom left of the four RCA jacks in the rightmost part of the picture above), I could only get either somewhat shabby monochrome/greyscale picture or extremely bad sorta-color mode rather than the fully decent composite CGA color mode I get when going composite on my LCD (through a hdmi converter).

Question 2: What could be the reasons for the sucky artifact/composite color on the 1084S-P2? Is this something that could be remedied via better RCA cables, for example?

I will post an image when I get back home today, to show how the screen looks in composite color.

 

[g4ugm]

Question 1: Say I would use a digital-to-analogue converter, such as this one, would the output quality on screen be noticably worse than it would have been if the monitor had accepted digital RGB natively, as it were?

I would expect the quality to be comparable, so long as you stick to RGB. A CRT is inherently Analog so the older monitors must have had something similar to this inside..

 

[boggit]

I would expect the quality to be comparable, so long as you stick to RGB. A CRT is inherently Analog so the older monitors must have had something similar to this inside..

Fair enough! Thank you for your reply!

The image quality is excellent on my Taiwanese 5153 clone (both on CGA and EGA), so I guess that monitor has some digital-to-analogue converter inside it as well. Also proves that there is nothing wrong with the CGA card itself.

 

[boggit]

I would expect the quality to be comparable, so long as you stick to RGB. A CRT is inherently Analog so the older monitors must have had something similar to this inside..

Also, would one or both of the cables listed here work as a CGA cable?