The signal to my projector is to weak?

[darin]

Hey guys, hope you can help me out with this.
I've spent what I consider a fair amount of money trying to hook up a projector in our church. I bought a brand new desktop computer, a new projector, a new graphics card (nVidia PCI) to support dual output (s-video), and it all hooks up and works great except that the display is in black and white only. It's not the cable, other s-video sources work fine and show in color. It's not the settings on the computer, when I hook up a six foot s-video cable to our big screen it works fine. But when I hook it up to our 50 ft. cable running to our projector it switches to B&W only. What can I do? It must be that the signal strenth from my computer isn't strong enough, but how can I make it stronger? How do people hook their computers up to projectors a long way away, and still have their displays show in color? I know there has to be a way. Any advice?
Thanks,
Darin

[Diceman]

Hi

If your sending YC sep (seperated luminance and chrominance) or even composite (the two combined) - you will find that the chrominance is the slighly less well preserved of the two. I know you've said your settings are right - but you can sometimes get no colour from using the wrong video standard (eg Pal-B instead of Pal-I or NtSC instead of PAL-B etc. - this will be in the advanced settings dialogue).

It could be your cable - Ordinarily 50ft should be fine - so it may be the quality of your lead. Lindy do excellent cables and you can find their site from a quick search in google. If this is not the solution you might want to shell out for a video distribution amp (for composite signals). I've successfully run composite and YC sep over distances in excess of 50meters without a video amp over audio XLR cable without chrominance loss - so I would check all the settings first before I invest any more money.

kind regards

Diceman

[Guest]

Try a extender cable for the power.
Connect the projector to the same power outlet as the computer.
In some cases ground can make strange things.

[mikeyp]

is it possible to get a multimeter to your cable to check for continuity - a broken wire could easily cause loss of anything