How does S-Video cable work?
Today S-Video is widely used in most of the DVD players, television sets, gaming consoles and graphics cards digital cable connectors and home theater systems. The S – Video has proved to be much economical and efficient as compared to the other digital connectors. S-Video is more commonly known as separate video or Y/C video. It is an analog video signal used today in most of the audio visual consoles. The S-Video cable or the connector carries the luminance signal or the Y signal which defines the black and white portion of the video or more simply, carries the brightness information and the chrominance signal or the C signal; which carries the color information separately in order to achieve superior video and picture quality.
The 4 pin mini DIN connector is most commonly found among the current devices; although 7 pin or 9 pin and 10 pin mini DIN connector are also available in the market. Previously in case of the traditional video or the composite video, both the signals were sent together. But as all the video output monitors are designed to display the chrominance and the luminance signals separately, the composite signals should be separated before displaying. But in the composite videos the signals overlap at frequency range higher than 2.1 MHz and when they cannot be separated entirely, it creates a disturbance in the video output. The remnants of either of the signal in the other are responsible for either the dot patterns in the output or the rainbow effect, also known as the ‘cross – color’ effect. Thus to minimize these problems the S-Video or the Separate video or the Super video came into the play. It was first used by JVC in the year 1987 and since the late nineties S-video began to show up in big screen television sets, DVD players, Gaming consoles and graphics cards, TFT monitors, digital TV receivers, high end video cassette players and several others.
The 4 pin mini DIN connectors are similar to the regular mini DIN connectors except from the impedance requirement. The connectors in the cables are gold plated and are almost 5m in length. The right and the left connectors are joined to the mini DIN. The cables support a frequency range of 25 Hz to 25000 Hz. The luminance and the chrominance data signals are transmitted separately through the cables which are finally decoded in the output device. To connect two devices through these cables, it must be kept in mind that both the devices should be S-Video compatible. The other S-Video connectors like the 7 pin, 9 pin and 10 pin mini DIN connectors are also available in the market but are rarely used. The 4 pin mini DIN connectors are mostly used in the present devices available.