TV Cable Fever

Since we purchased our LCD flat panel, I've been fixated on getting the best picture quality and hooking up all our components together. Very quickly I realized how little I knew about digital video. For starters, these days there are like 6 different ways to transfer video. What happened to just plugging the yellow rca cable to the back of the tv? Anyways I found a cool little tutorial online that gives you the low down on everything you need to know to hook your cable and hdtv monitor, and get the best picture quality.

So here are the basics in order of best to worst:

HDMI cable - The best quality, true digital quality.

DVI cable - HDMI's adopted sibling

VGA cable - Mostly from computers

Component cable - 3 cables that seperate red, green & blue colors for great quality

S-Video cable - 1 cable that separates brightness from color for very good quality

Composite cable - the good old yellow rca cable, fast plug and play for descent quality

Coaxial cable - the worst and most used, the stiff white and very long cable that comes with your cable box.

I hate coaxial cables they are ugly, always too long and as you can see from my list above of inferior quality. But the worst thing is that its everywhere. They use it to run the main cable line into most homes, I mean they might as well run a telephone line through my place. Since our condo was built in the 70's the cable is not built into the walls, which means we have to run it under the carpet and along the edge of the walls...not the prettiest thing.