PS2 and 720 / 1080 TV's

[Eleven19]

Alright, so here is my problem. I'm sorry if this is kinda vague I'm not exactly sure of all the details, I can try to answer some questions if it'll help with the solution.

So I bought a new TV since my old one took a shit and my brother in law needed his old one back, lol. I got a nice looking, cheap, Insignia 32 inch flatscreen 720p. I set my 360 up on it, changed the settings to work with 720p, fits fine.

My PS2 though looks terrible if I set it to widescreen setting, so I just deal with it and play middle screen with two black bars on either side of it. No big deal.

So right now I'm house sitting at the neighbors and I forgot to bring alcohol, and I decided to bring my PS2 and do some grauberg augment item disappointment shit. I hook it all up to my neighbor's sony flatscreen (Looks like 1080p, bigger than mine and she's loaded so), and the picture looks 100x better. Stretches across screen with very little distortion, detail is better, etc.

So my question is, is there some settings I need to mess with on my 720, or is 1080 a different aspect ratio that makes it so I can't stretch my screen to widescreen on PS2 on 720 and have it look this good. It looks awful on my 720p if I set the TV to widescreen settings.

So yeah, my question's probably all fucked up. Anyone got any ideas lol.

[Kurokikaze]

720 and 1080 are the same aspect ratio: 16:9.

Try turning on the PS2 without any CD in and going into the settings. Change the aspect ratio to 16:9 and turn on Progressive Scan. Note: Not all PS2s have this option. Even then that shouldn't make much of a difference though since theres only like a handful of PS2 games that even support progressive scan.

Also her TV probably has better scaling features than yours does. Try messing around with the scaling settings for your TV and look for 1:1. Although I'm not sure if HDTVs have that. Good luck. ;X

[Eleven19]

Yeah I didn't see the scaling settings, I looked all through the settings. All I found was "Normal, Wide, Zoom, Cinema".

And I think its BS because I'm pretty sure Cinema is some kinda zoom wide shitty combination.

Now I did hear about the PS2 ratio but someone told me that it was only for movies. I also tried setting FFXI itself on 16:9 ratio and set the TV to wide but it looked all kinds of stupid lol.

Thanks for the tips, I'll check into it when I get home.

[Eleven19]

Alright so I got home, checked out the PS2. I tried a few settings.

The best setting seems to be the "Full" setting, and then I switched the TV to "wide" like the 360's settings, THEN changed FFXI's configure aspect ratio to 16:9

Looks way better now. I also found the old monster cable I used for the way old TV a few years ago to clean it up a little bit. Thanks for the help man.

[Isiolia]

Change the aspect ratio to 16:9 and turn on Progressive Scan. Note: Not all PS2s have this option. Even then that shouldn't make much of a difference though since theres only like a handful of PS2 games that even support progressive scan.

There are actually a fair number that do support it, but the "problem" as it were is that enabling it is often not even mentioned outside a blurb in the manual.

Any that support progressive scan, at least that I own/have seen, are enabled by holding X and Triangle when the game is starting up. You'll get a little prompt saying it'll now try progressive mode, then it'll swap, ask you if you want to keep it in that mode, etc.
You need to do that every. frickin. time.

If they changed that in the slimlines or something, I dunno, I don't have the option to enable progressive scan in my system menu (though these days I just use PS3 backwards compatibility, which keeps the correct aspect and generally looks nicer to boot).

Couldn't say for FFXI though, since that I play on PC - I've got the 360 version, but it's pretty crappy...

[bungiefan]

PS2 system interface doesn't support progressive scan. It's 480i-only. Games have to support the mode, and either have the Cross + Triangle method, or an in-game menu if they support the mode at all. The requirement for the mode enabling at every boot is so that you don't get stuck in progressive mode on a screen that doesn't support it, and so that you can't enable it easily and accidentally if running on a screen without support. When PS2 came out, progressive scan wasn't commonly supported.

The PS2 may have looked better on your neighbor's screen because their TV may have a better upscaler and deinterlacer than your does.