TV Picture Setting Tips for Intellivision

[Intelligentleman]

After experimenting with my TV picture settings, as well as various connection options, I learned a few best practices:

 

• Brightness/Contrast/Color/Sharpness - What looks good for a digital signal may not be ideal for your Intellivision's video output. In my case, the "movie" setting of my TV had way too much brightness and contrast, both of which were adding/amplifying unnecessary noise to the picture.

 

• Artificial Processing - Turn off anything that requires the TV perform additional processing of the video input signal. This may clean up some noise and get you closer to what was originally intended.

 

• RF Switch Box - Remove this from your setup and replace with a male RF phono cable that has a female coax input on the other end. Then, use a quality coax cable to connect the Intellivision to the TV. In my experience, using an RCA cable instead of a coax connection resulted in increased noise. 

 

Hope these little tips are helpful. Feel free to share any of your own best practices for a good Intellivision picture.

Edited February 14, 2020 by Intelligentleman

[+stupus]

Older rca cables intended for old game systems that are in nice shape work good. But newer ones.....even overly expensive ones are usually not great and have noise and a coax cable is much better.

Also some newer tvs might not like the old rf signal and yoy might need to run thru a vcr or signal amplifier to get the tv to accept the signal.

[mr_me]

Modern televisions often have a "game mode" setting.  This should turn off extra picture processing and more importantly helps reduce latency inherent to digital televisions.

 

Yes the output is RF and requires a shielded RF cable.  Typical AV cables are not RF shielded.

[Sinjinhawke]

1 hour ago, stupus said:Also some newer tvs might not like the old rf signal and yoy might need to run thru a vcr or signal amplifier to get the tv to accept the signal.

This is so true.  On my television sometimes I couldn’t get audio from the Intellivision through RF and with the System Changer I could never get sound. Putting a VCR between the TV and Intellivision eliminated that issue.