Why all the fuss over hdmi dvi s- video ect. when the cable into the house is plain old cable?

Answer 1

Yep, it's plain old cable. If your cable company supplies something better than analog, then it's not just plain old cable. By 2009 all TV's will need to operate on digital signal, if you have the analog tv only then there will need to be a box to convert the digital back to analog.

Cable Co's may be sending a digital an/or a hdef signal. The satellite companies are already sending you a signal that is digital, and HDef. it becomes the subscribers responsibility to subscribe to to the HDef programming and have a HDef receiver.
Some Cable companies have digital and HDef signals coming over the cable, if you have a HDef TV and the cable co supplies you a box then you have HDef pics. The cable company in some cases will furnish a card for those HDEF tv's that are card ready.

Some HDEF tv's handle most of it without the cable company equipment. You may get everything except the TV Guide--that is a different story and I need not go into it here.

Back to the Cables, in the event you have a Sat. rec, or a cable box. The plain old cable feeds these pieces of equipment, and they in turn convert the signal to HDef or Digital. If you do not have a tv that handles everything for you (it would have to have HDef tuner built in) if not then the cables from the box to the tv is where all the fuss lies. S-video carries the pic. to you tv and is a better signal than coxial alone, you will also use audio cables with the s-video, step up in quality to componet, three color cables and two audio cables. There is some debate about dvi being better than this you also use the two audio cables. HDMI does it all and offers the best signal and carries the audio.

The key to this all is the tv having HDMI and your receiver having HDMI then your set. if one or the other is not HDMI then maybe it has DVI if so you can get a cable that is HDMI on one end and DVI on the other, then you have to add the audio cable.

All this also applies to your DVD player be it HD or Not.

So you see, I HOPE cables do make the difference, and it really does make a difference with the quality of your picture.

Answer 2

Depending what system you are on.
Most cable TV companies are offering Digital/HD and analog.
Of course the analog is no good anymore and correct, DVI, RGB, S-Video at this point won’t matter much.
However, a digital signal is not subject to “noise” in the line like its cousin, analog.
At the same point, you don’t want to destroy a perfectly good digital signal by using the RF output of a cable box by now modulating the signal and adding noise.
If you can go DVI, great. If not, try RGB, S-Video then Coax (RF), in that order.

Answer 3

You can't use plain old cable to hook up a HD-DVD, blu-ray, PS3, xbox360, & DVR's (just to name a few) to your TV.
Right?