Why does the Wii look a bit blocky on my LCD?

[the klaxon]

Got myself a Wii a few days ago, got SMG too, I must say, it is great fun and I'm really loving the Golf on WiiSports. However, I thought the graphics would be alot better than what they are. Doesn't even compare to Gamecube graphics as far as I can see, so what's going on?

I used to play my Gamecube through composite on a CRT tele and it looked great, now I am playing a Wii on a Sony Bravia 26" through an official component cable and it just looks slightly above average.

What am I doing wrong, I have tried playing about with the Wii's settings but SMG still doesn't look as good as the adverts or screenshots in magazines.

Help!

[sj33]

Non-HD stuff like the Wii doesn't look particularly stellar on an LCD. If you tried your GC on the TV it would look about the same.

[MattyD]

The Wii only outputs 480p so your LCD is upscaling the image to make it fit the (much higher resolution) screen, exaggerating all the flaws in the image which you wouldn't have noticed so much on a CRT. It's basically the same as if you stuck your face right up to the screen on a CRT - there's nothing unusual going on except that you're able to scrutinise in greater detail.

[MJ]

Open a 480 pixel height image in Photoshop and resize it to 720/1080 and see what happens.

[Profit]

Open a 480 pixel height image in Photoshop and resize it to 720/1080 and see what happens.

It looks the same or better, certainly not worse.

Same with DVDs, watching them on larger higher res screens is usually always better.

There are actual problems and quality issues with the Wii component output. The quality issues are simply a case of the analog component circuitry on the Wii not as good (as the GC?) as they could be.

[rmoxon]

It looks the same or better, certainly not worse.

Same with DVDs, watching them on larger higher res screens is usually always better.

There are actual problems and quality issues with the Wii component output. The quality issues are simply a case of the analog component circuitry on the Wii not as good (as the GC?) as they could be.

Umm, no you are completely wrong, upscaling an image that is made for a lower definition output will always look blocky becuase you are seeing the image bigger than it was made to be seen. Standard DVD's dont look as good on LCD screens either. Youre wrong about the size of the screen too, smaller tv's usualy get sharper looking images even if you see less detail.

Anyway as many people have said the Wii just isnt an HD gaming machine so is never going to look that great on a LCD screen regardless of any of these so called circutry problems you mentioned.

[Lyris]

Got myself a Wii a few days ago, got SMG too, I must say, it is great fun and I'm really loving the Golf on WiiSports. However, I thought the graphics would be alot better than what they are. Doesn't even compare to Gamecube graphics as far as I can see, so what's going on?

I used to play my Gamecube through composite on a CRT tele and it looked great, now I am playing a Wii on a Sony Bravia 26" through an official component cable and it just looks slightly above average.

What am I doing wrong, I have tried playing about with the Wii's settings but SMG still doesn't look as good as the adverts or screenshots in magazines.

Help!

As people have said, the Wii is only standard definition and you're using an HDTV, but you're right to be underwhelmed because not only is the Wii SD, it's also average quality SD.

There's a few reasons for this. One suggested reason is that a lot of Wii games seem to do widescreen "on the cheap" and the Wii isn't using all 480 lines of resolution in 16:9 mode most of the time (instead it's slicing the top and bottom of the image of). I'm not sure if that's true.

What certainly is true is that the Wii flicker filters (that's a fancy way of saying "blurs") its video output. If you look at the Wii main menu, it's filtered to an insane amount. Look at the clarity of your Mii's faces in the Mii channel (filtered to hell) and then compare the same Mii faces to selecting them in Wii Sports (either not filtered or filtered lighter, I can't tell).

Most DVDs are also pre-filtered as well before MPEG encoding which again robs them of most of the nice detail that our eyes love. But the Wii takes the cake. I have to say, it's interesting that everyone notices the Wii looks worse than it should, but Hollywood has been getting away with it on DVDs for years. I guess it's because people (rightly) expect their video games to be pixel sharp.

Open a 480 pixel height image in Photoshop and resize it to 720/1080 and see what happens.

Umm, no you are completely wrong, upscaling an image that is made for a lower definition output will always look blocky becuase you are seeing the image bigger than it was made to be seen. Standard DVD's dont look as good on LCD screens either. Youre wrong about the size of the screen too, smaller tv's usualy get sharper looking images even if you see less detail.

Actually, you're mostly wrong, and slightly right. Scaling is a necessary evil but Profit is correct when he says that the Wii's video output is sub-par. I don't know if it's a hardware problem (bad circuitry) or if I'm right when I say it's a deliberate blur (probably to hide complaints about jaggies?) but trust me as a DVD author and hardware reviewer when I say it's definitely sub-par.

The Photoshop thing is a good way of illustrating what is happening.

Here's a 720x480 (480p) picture. Looks nice and detailed:



Here it is scaled up to the resolution of your BRAVIA TV (1366x768). This is done in Photoshop, but the scaling in your TV is pretty similar. It still looks pretty damn good.



Here it is aggressively flicker filtered and then scaled to the resolution of your TV:

[the klaxon]

I took the Wii to my old CRT tele, you know, just to see if it made a difference...and blimey! did it ever! The Wii image on the CRT ( running through the bog standard composite cable ) was as smooth as a baby's bum, no blocky bits at all.

Does this mean that I will have to have two TV's now for my gaming needs? The Sony LCD for my 360 and a CRT next to it for the Wii, that's ridiculous!

What does everyone else around here do when faced with this dilema?

[Lyris]

It's not just you, I noticed how good the Wii looked at my friend's place on her CRT (this was Composite NTSC compared to my Component 480p). You can get away with that kind of flicker filtering on a CRT, but panel-based displays are just so, so revealing.

I just grin and bear it, I don't have the room for 2 TVs.

[Daragon]

I'm usually a graphics whore, but when some of the games on the Wii play as good as they do, you totally forget all about visuals. MS and Sony really need a zelda-esque epic.

Sod these 5 hour "romps", bring back the epic 100 hour adventures ffs! You spend long enough working on them.

[Lyris]

Yeah Daragon, I agree. I mean look at RE4 on the Wii, that looked pretty crap from a technical standpooint but I've not had as much fun with any other game this year.

[Spatial]

I also use my old 34" monster CRT in my living room for playing mine. I wouldn't say it's smooth but the TV does hide a lot of the imperfections (at the cost of a drop in image sharpness, but then you can't have it all).

It's also handy because not only does it look better, I can also swing myself about without fear of smashing the remote or my shins on something.

[Profit]

CRTs upscaling tends to produce a more blurry image than LCD due to the design (the gun hits the phosphors to best approximation and not with individual pixel control). So for SD gaming material where there are distinctly rendered pixels, a CRT set will hide jaggies and blend adjacent color gradients a bit more than LCD. But for SD movie material such as DVDs where there are fewer or no identifiable distinct pixels, the digital upscaling on LCDs preserve the sharpness a bit more than CRTs.

With either type, a decent upscaler never deteriorates the image. It will always look same or better. Size of the screen has no influence on image quality.

Unfortunately people rarely make comparisons using suitable sets or settings. The contrast on CRTs are usually far higher resulting in a narrower color space than on LCDs. Also inevitably, people are tempted by size over quality so they end up with a bigger but poorer quality set.

----

The GC had circuitry for digital output whereas the Wii doesn't (although VGA could be possible with some hacks). This has also allowed the DAC chip to be built internally into the Wii (whereas on GC cables DAC is inside the cable head, hence the price of GC component). The DAC chip type on GC and Wii seems to be the same though, so either the configuration differences or just generally poorer circuitry is causing Wii component not to look as good as GC. i think there's some debate on whether RGB 480i on pal Wii machines may be better than component 480p.

[Jason]

On my 37" Plasma, the Wii looks much better and sharper set to 480i. Set to 480p, the image looks too soft.

[sj33]

Is there any truth to the rumour that the PAL Wii Component looks worse than the NTSC one? Because I've not had too much to complain about with the NTSC Wii, flicker filter aside.