[quote name='cliffclaven2']I would like to offer an explanation of why some may think the ps2 looks worse than others.
If you followed the early days of the ps3, it's backward compatibility for ps2 titles was crappy for 480i games. It produced "extra" jaggies because of pixel flipping.
Screenshots and an expanation can be found here:
http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&thread.id=808212
This was fixed with a firmware update from Sony.
However, my old ps2 gives the exact same results with 480i games when played using component cables. This is a bug in the ps2's rendering of 480i games over component connections.
This does not happen with my new slim ps2. Sony fixed the problem it would seem. Perhaps it was only broken with a select run of ps2's. Would be nice to know which ones were affected.
Again, the only situation where this effect is seen is with 480i games (final fantasy 12 for example) while using component cables (sony, monster, doesn't matter) and only on certain models of ps2 (and early ps3 firmware) on your hdtv.
(no it doesn't matter the hdtv, I've got 3).[/QUOTE]
I brought my fat PS2 to my sister's house tonight for some Rock Band. It's a SCPH-39001 model. She has an HDTV and I hooked the PS2 up with a component cable and saw this jagged problem with the display of text at initial start up of the game. If I'm recalling correctly, it's before it confirms whether or not you want to run in progressive scan mode. This would make sense from what you say above, as that means that portion was 480i. After that I think it looked fine, but maybe the text still looked bad? I'm not sure now. In any case, at least some of the time the jaggies were pretty bad.
Do all fat PS2s have this problem, or do later versions of the fat PS2 have this fixed? I would prefer to have a fat PS2 due to the HDD option, but then again, whenever I upgrade to an HDTV I'm going to be sad with my current system. Along those lines, what is the model number of the newest fat-style PS2 produced?