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When I capture a video from my VCR (a Sharp VC-M401SM) with an S-Video cable connected to a SCART adaptor (like the one shown in this post) I obtain a gray-scale image.

One possibility for this is that the VCR is not capable to output an S-Video signal. To understand if this was the true reason I compared some couples of images composed by:

  • the gray-scale image obtained using the S-Video cable;
  • an image obtained by acquiring a colored image from the composite signal and then converted to grayscale.

Here is one example:

First image

Second image

It seems to me that there are little differences between the two images. I guess that these differences result from noise and from color to gray-scale conversion. This makes me think that the quality of the images is comparable.

Therefore I conclude that the gray-scale output when using the S-Video cable is not due a problem in the croma component, but instead due to the fact that the VCR does not support the S-Video output.

Questions

  • Is my reasoning correct? Can we conclude from this test that the VCR does not support S-Video?
  • If not, what can we conclude instead?
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  • You are likely comparing the same signal against itself, see allpinouts.org/pinouts/cables/audio_video/… - SCART pin 19 carries the identical signal to both connectors. So it's a question of whether SCART pin 15 (chrominance) is carrying any signal.
    – Peter Barton
    May 8, 2020 at 11:23
  • Thanks for the suggestion. I just checked that the SCART pin 15 was not cabled inside the VCR. So I conclude that the differences in the two images above is only due to noise.
    – simonet
    May 31, 2020 at 7:51

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