TO HDMI OR NOT TO HDMI THAT IS THE QUESTION

I know that many of you out there are curious as to how much of a difference or even if there is a difference between using Component cable (Red, Green, and Blue) or HDMI cable. I won’t go into the many differences within the cables themselves. I also won’t talk about shielding or how the cable is constructed in this post.

This post I want to pose a very simple thought to all of you. You went out and you spent anywhere from 1000 dollars to a few thousand dollars on a beautiful digital HDTV. You have probably seen HD and realize that hey this looks pretty good. And being the informed person that you are, you understand that in order to get it looking the way you seen it at the store, you need the HD BOX. So you call up your cable or satellite provider and they either sell you, direct you where to buy, or rent you either an HD Box or HD PVR. When you get this glorious gateway into superior picture and surround sound quality television programming, you open the box and there are three RCA cables of a different colour than you are used to seeing.

You remember the salesman telling you that you should get an HDMI cable but just as you thought, there is a cable in the box and it will do just fine. Worse still you had your service provider come to your house and tell you to return your HDMI cable, that these component cables will do the same thing....but will they?

The box you just got, is what is known as a digital box, because it's job is to receive a compressed digital signal and then uncompress it. This is easy for those of us on cable signals to understand as our provider calls this service “Digital Cable.” But even if you are on Satellite this is still a digital signal. The new TV that you have is as mentioned above a digital television. The component cable that you are about to use for your no doubt expensive investment is an analogue cable. This means that your digital box has to convert the digital signal to analogue (DAC) to send through these component cables. It just keeps getting better though, because now, your digital television needs to convert the signal from analogue back to digital (ADC) to display this picture. Friends, anytime you convert anything you lose quality.

Why would you want to lose quality on the main purpose of your purchase, just to save a few dollars. I am not saying that you need to go out and buy the top of the line Monster HDMI cables for your television viewing. No as of yet, a simple entry model monster cable, or even another companies HDMI cable will suffice. I am however saying that it makes much, much more sense to leave your signal digital the whole way through. That way you have no quality loss, and you are ensured the greatest high definition picture for your Fringe, House MD, or Prison Break that you can get at the time.