[chrisdisregard]

I did a search in the forum and came up with a bunch of articles relating to mac mini's and newer iMacs (with DVI output) but nothing relating to my iMac, so sorry if this is a repeat question, but I couldn't find anything.

Anyway, I've got an LCD TV (Prima LC-27U16 to be exact) and I decided I'd like to try and use it as the main monitor for my iMac. As I said in the title I'm running a G5 pre-iSight model, which has a mini-VGA output. Without doing much research into it I went out and bought the Apple mini-VGA to video adapter and plugged it into the TV through an S-video cable. Big waste of money there...well, waste of the $35 anyway. So what I was wondering is, would the quality be better through the VGA input (which I noticed, while performing my initial test, my TV also has) or is there some series of converters I could use to plug it into the HDMI input, or should I just not bother?

[ibook_steve]

What's wrong with s-video and why was it a waste of money? Isn't that what you wanted? Yes, you can use the VGA just like a monitor. That requires the mini-VGA to VGA adaptor and a VGA cable. No, you cannot use HDMI because that iMac does not have a digital video output like DVI.

Steve

[chrisdisregard]

The quality of s-video is horrible. After a bit of fiddling with resolutions, brightness and contrast I managed to get the text legible, though it would be a strain after a while. DVDs, photos and things were alright, slightly lower than DVD quality, but still ok. Nowhere near the quality to make it really worthwhile on a daily basis though.

From everything I've read there's quite a noticable jump in quality when using something higher than s-video, so I was just wondering if it was possible to get decent results with a converter of some type (or a number of converters if that wouldn't degrade the signal too much) or if VGA would be better quality than s-video.

Of course I'm more than willing to admit I may just have screwed up the set up or something, but I tried pretty much every resolution combination I could and the best I could get was a semi-decent picture at 800x600 (can't remember if it was 50MHz or 60MHz, most of the resolutions would only allow one or the other)