That's often true but YMMV. :) My IBM Thinkpad which uses an ATI Mobility 128 graphics chipset displays Svideo beautifully. It displays 800x600 at full screen on a TV. It downsamples but the text comes out very sharp, graphics come out great... however, my home pc with an ATI All-in-Wonder displays crap s-video. text comes out badly, when you display 800x600 you have to scroll around....

Also NTSC has 525 scan lines but in practice it's much less than that. 525 is the total including the overscan area behind the frame of the tv to the edge of the tube.

Calvin