Checked it out and played it last night while I was there... I generally agree with your statement although I think I prefer it to the projector. The projector had really bad burn-in, was too far away (for my preference), and was the wrong aspect ratio.OrangeLounger wrote:And the Sanyo they got hooked up to IIDX is really blurry and laggy. Sucks.
The main problem with the new TV (it's a consumer TV and not a monitor) is that they're using composite video to connect the game to it. You TV-knowledgeable people will recognize that as the LEAST preferable, lowest quality input. This is what's causing the "blurriness" of the picture and the color bleed. They're also using half of a really cheap audio cable (one side of a stereo set). It's a pretty short run, but that can't be helping the situation any.
Also, that's a progressive scan digital HD monitor. Composite video is an interlaced analog signal. So the TV has to convert the incoming signal before it displays it. This takes a little bit of time and is what's causing the lag. I was able to adjust my timing by hitting notes slightly before they got all the way to the line.
Unfortunately, this particular TV doesn't seem to be all that good at this conversion either. I noticed it would actually occasionally drop frames causing the image to stutter slightly. I would occasionally see notes skip a bit rather than flow smoothly down the columns.
In one case, it seem to deinterlace one half of the screen differently from the other because I saw notes on one side of the screen (I was playing Light 14) that were not inline with notes on the other side suddenly become inline with them about halfway down the scroll. It was rather bizarre. The fact that the signal going into the TV isn't all that great (composite on a cheap cable) probably contributes to some of these problems.
The IIDX system should support S-video. This should produce a cleaner image and eliminate the color bleeding. It probably wouldn't help with the lag though because the TV would still have to deinterlace and upconvert the signal. It might do a better job of this with a higher quality input signal though. There may also be some options in the TV's menu to turn off some of the processing. That might speed it up a little and reduce some of the lag.
Ideally, you'd want to use the RGB output of the IIDX system. This is how the stock monitor would have been connected and will produce the best quality image. However, this being a consumer TV, it doesn't have an RGB input since most consumer-grade video equipment in the US doesn't support it. It does have component inputs--which are arguably just as good as RGB--but those won't be compatible with the IIDX system.
Probably more than most cared to know, but the take away from this is that they could improve it (not perfect, but better) for about $10 for an s-video cable and maybe 5 minutes to hook it up.