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 :)