BNC vs. RCA?

HybridCreations

HybridCreations

Well-known member
I guess this goes here. I had a two camera shoot this weekend and I noticed something very strange. My camera was connected to the monitor via a BNC cable (with RCA adapter for the camera). The other camera was connected to the monitor via a long RCA cable (with BNC adapter for the monitor). Same monitor, both cameras had all the same settings but looked TOTALLY different on the monitor (Camera with RCA cable looked really flat, BNC looked vibrant). Is there some kind of fundamental difference between BNC cable and RCA cable that would cause it to look so different? I guess it could be a lot of different things (adapters, outputs) but I switched everything around and it looked like it was the cable. Any thoughts?
-Ryan
 
There's an impedance and noise issue.

BNC connectors offer both lower impedance and less introduced signal-noise, than do RCA connectors.

I suspect that's behind the image-quality differences you noticed.
 
Yes, there is a considerable difference between these two types of cables. Not only is it much more likely that the BNC terminated cable was an impedance characterized cable, but its intrinsic bandwidth would typically be much more appropriate.

Your description of "flat" versus "vibrant" is exactly what one would expect from a bandwidth limited situation. Length will exacerbate these differences and make the effect even more pronounced.

No surprise at all here, just simple physics at work.
 
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