SCART to S-Video - Black and White Picture

First of all, the reality. Two old TV sets, no DVD player. But a nice shiny Dell 1720 Laptop. So, the solution: a SCART to S-Video adapter which would connect my laptop to the TV.

Well, I first got an adapter locally. I specifically asked for one which would send both picture and sound to the TV. Lo and behold, I get one which would only transfer picture. And what is more, a black and white picture only. A short surf on the net soon reveals that these SCART-SVideo adapters are as temperamental as a film star, and the black and white picture phenomenon is quite frequent.

After a lot of coming and going, and after reading about a couple of solutions (most brutal of which consisted of instructions about how to open up the TV set and shorting a couple of pins on the internal adapter, with the side effect of possibly shortening the TV set life to the very near future), I finally got a SCART to S-Video converter of a better quality from http://www.svideo.com/. Surprise surprise, only 4 days to ship from the other side of the world. Not too bad. Furthermore, this one actually allowed me to send audio as well as video from my laptop, through the headphones jack. So I set up the right connections, fired up my lappy, switched on the TV, and everything worked, right?

Wrong. I got the audio. I also got the picture. But with a little hitch - a black and white picture! Frustration engulfs at this point. This was supposed to be a "just works" adapter. No major surgeries on the TV set. No (god forbid) surgeries on the laptop.

Well, obviously I got a solution, otherwise I would not be here rambling about this little episode. The solution is simple (once you latch onto it). I had to set the right display settings on the video card to NSTC or PAL. Here's how I did it on my Dell 1720:

1) Right click on the desktop
2) Choose NVIDEA Control Panel
3) Choose Video and Television

Now at this point I don't remember exactly what I did - since my lappy is not connected to the TV at this point so I cannot actually replicate the process. However, what I needed to change was the TV Standard, from somewhere in this section. For me, the NTSC and PAL worked - gave me a great colour picture actually. But this depends on the TV set (I guess). Anyways, I'll put more precise details at this point, but just in case anyone needs the info before then, there you are :)

Dell 1720 Alpine White

Guess what...got my new shiny Dell 1720 laptop today :). These come in various colours and I opted for the Alpine White. So you might say it has a touch of the MAC, but anyways - the 'metallic' paint gives it a sleek look, imho.


Of course I didn't get the basic model. I customised it a bit to get that extra little bit of grunt out of this machine. The main tweaks were a 2.4Ghz Core 2 DUO processor, 4GB of RAM, a high-res 1920x1200 screen and a 9V battery.


The 4GB RAM is a bit wasted with the 32-bit version of Windows Vista that comes with it - I can "only" use 3.5GB of it. But the intention is to upgrade to the 64-bit version of the OS in the nearby future, so that's OK. The battery life with the 9v battery is OK for a machine of this performance - I can get up to 4 hours of adequatly heavy processing and WIFI connectivity. Admittedly, the battery does look a bit ugly sticking out at the back, but hey, you can't have the cake and eat it I guess. All in all, seems a good machine. Performance is great - I have already installed the tools I need most, including Visual Studio 2008 and Adobe Photoshop CS3, and they run much niftier than on my single core AMD PC. Moreover, the laptop is actually usable. Since this is my first laptop, I was a bit wary at first of the keyboard and stuff, but the keyboard that comes with the Dell 1720 has a great layout, not to mention the availability of numeric pad. A pleasant surprise, that.


Lastly, here are some pix of the actual thingie: