page_title: Color Graphics Adapter
section_title: Composite output
hierarchical_section_title: Color Graphics Adapter / Composite output
caption_attribution_description: English: CGA 80-column text display on RGB vs. Composite monitors.
context_page_description: The Color Graphics Adapter, originally also called the Color/Graphics Adapter or IBM Color/Graphics Monitor Adapter, introduced in 1981, was IBM's first color graphics card for the IBM PC and established a de-facto computer display standard.
context_section_description: Using the composite output instead of an RGBI monitor produced lower-quality video, due to NTSC's inferior separation between luminance and chrominance. This is especially a problem with 80-column text:
  For this reason, each of the text and graphics modes has a duplicate mode which disables the composite colorburst, resulting in a black-and-white picture, but also eliminating color bleeding to produce a sharper picture. On RGBI monitors, the two versions of each mode are usually identical, with the exception of the 320×200 graphics mode, where the "monochrome" version produces a third palette.
caption: 80-column text on RGB (left) vs. composite monitor (right)
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