Increase screen resolution via composite output?

It is a European, originally French, standard. It has appeared on almost all European TV sets in the past 30 years, but now it is disappearing because of the physically large size and the decision to not support HD on it.

Please note that today you can buy a small Full-HD LCD (LED backlight) TV with all kinds of input you may ever want for half the price that I paid to get a CRT portable color TV with only SCART in the eighties.

And is in absolute price, not counting inflation.

You can also buy a Raspberry PI for 1/25th of what I paid for a simple

I think the kids should not complain.

It actually is a very clever design. One connector to connect everything in one go (instead of fiddling with up to 5 cinch connectors to get only a single-direction connection). Cable is always a crossed connection so no matter what you connect to what, it always works with only one type of connecting cable. Autoswitching allows the TV to automatically determine the type of signal transferred and to select the proper input when an external device is switched on. Capable of bi-directional signal transfer.

Connector now is bulky but was compatible with build methods of those days (single layer PCB, hand-soldered cables). May look ugly but usually better contact than many other connector designs of the time, even in lowcost construction.

Who's complaining?

The point of the RPi is that you *shouldn't* need to buy extra equipment to make it work.

Ah.. then I missed that point! I don't think I ever had a computer that I had to buy more extra equipment for to make it work than the Raspberry Pi.

you can buy all inclusive pi kits,

OTOH can assemble an PC from parts

case, CPU, motherboard, RAM, disk drive. (options: video card, sound card, PSU(opften included with the case), optical drive)

It sounds magic until you realise how many impossible combinations there are, and how many devices only implement part of the standard and just assume they're the only device ;)

SCART was reasonably good at what it did but it was still a long way off idiot proof :)

A Raspberry Pi is more like a PC motherboard. You need all kinds of parts and an enclosure in addition to the basic device.

I beg to differ.

Perhaps you bought your Pi in a package, with software and peripherals included, and that's absolutely fine if you did.

But the whole point of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, was to offer the board only, at a low price.

That is what some of us find so attractive.

Take my Pi as an example, I bought it for a particular project. It runs headless, so a keyboard, mouse and screen are unnecessary, even for initial set-up.

The PSU I selected is a 3.8A one, chosen so it can also supply power to the other elements of my project.

SD cards are ubiquitous, as are the other items, so I got some to meet my needs.

Operating system and application software was available, as usual, as a downloadable image.

Well the decision "not to support HD" is sensible. If you wanted to have high def analogue video inputs you would use VGA anyway, that way all the chips for interfacing it to your display already exist off the shelf.

Using analogue video signals to interface a digital video source with a digital monitor is crazy though and just adds hardware costs to products (at both ends of the cable) just so you can have a worse display.

But you can easily open the connector and clip that wire. Try to do that with a modern standard.

That must be a low priority for designers, as the HDMI connector, which has way less retaining force, doesn't have a clip either.

Nope. Bought the bare board.

Maybe I wasn't clear. What I meant was that most people should have all they need to get an RPi running after buying the bare board - in addition to knowing what to do.

SD card (from camera) - check Power supply (from mobile phone) - check keyboard/mouse (from PC) - check monitor (TV) - check

A typical house has all the above. They may not all be spare, but can at least be borrowed when not otherwise being used.

That's just sad.