I have been experiencing a very odd problem connecting a dvd to a tv. I have a somewhat older Mitsubishi television that has multiple input ports on the backside -- two antennae ports, two separate RCA ports (YRW flavor), and one RCA+S-Video port (SV, R, W flavor). We have a handful of dvd players in our house, and all work perfectly on other tv's.
The problem exists when connecting certain players to our tv the same way we connect everything else -- go straight to an external input, either with or without the S-Video. The result is that the picture is totally grayscale. I can't get any sort of color, thought hte picture itself is not distorted in any way. I have verified that the settings are correctly set to S-Video instead of YUV, and I've tried sending the data to all three input ports. I'm never tried going to an antennae port, but I shouldn't have to considering that other dvd players work fine.
We have a Cinevision dvd/vcr combo box that won't spin dvds anymore (though it still plays music cds), whihc is why we bought a new dvd player. Otherwise, this wouldn't be a problem. I've seen this occur on systems belonging to other people, but I never stayed around to finish troubleshooting. Has anyone seen a problem like this before? Google wasn't much help, which is surprising.