G400 DH Black&White (Gray) S-video output

[lancelot]

Hi all...

I've been browsing through the forum, looking for a subject on this matter, but it seems no one has a solution for this problem (even though the subject occured once or twice).

I have a G400 Dual Head card and I'm using the S-video output on the secondary video output. I am using a 4 pins S-video cable (male - male) to connect the card with my (PAL) Sony TV. Ofcourse, I've connected the 4 pin cable to the S-video input (->3). On the TV I've selected YC 3 and I'm having a black&white picture. Naturally, I have not checked the B&W option in PowerDesk.

Does anyone know why I am having a gray picture? And what I can do to solve this? I'm almost certain that pins 5, 6 and 7 on the supplied Matrox S-video female-connector have NOTHING to do with this so it must be something else. Any suggestions?

BTW, a close friend of mine has the same problem with his Miro DC10plus and his VCR. I've looked into that problem before but wasn't able to locate the problem. Perhaps a similar problem here.

Please, I'm sorry if the subject was mentioned before but I am at a loss at the moment...

With kind regards,
Mark Loman

[truncated]

Newer TVs have a couple composite inputs as well as svideo. On my TV, I have two composite inputs, and one svideo. My TV lets me chose the source of the video from 3 selections. Video1 is the receiver on the TV, Video2 is the first composite input, and Video3 is the second composite input. The S-video is also Video2, so this turns out to be the problem.

I had black and white on my VCR the other day, turns out I had the svideo from my DVD player plugged into the TV at the same time. In this case, both the svideo and the VCR composite inputs were considered video2. So I simply moved the VCR composite input to the video3 setting, and color was restored!

[Meek]

Hi. I can only think of mechanical problems:

1) bad cable
2) bent pin
3) connector not seated properly

Or then you have NTSC enabled on the G400...

M.

[Nuno]

I have the same problem. I started a thread some time ago with the same subject, and the fact is that the TV (or video?) must support a s-video source input, or it will display a B&W picture. Mine doesn´t, so I´m stuck with composite now. I´ll look for that when I buy a new TV.