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HD Cable question...


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Forgive my ignorance :)

A friend has an older Pioneer Elite 65"?? HD capable tv. It did not come with the High Def tuner installed. Now, if he gets HD Cable.. That box should be all he needs.... right? Or am I wrong, and he need to get the box for the TV first? Seems to me they should be one in the same?

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Correct, the HD Cable box would act as the tuner for the HD cable signal. As long as the display has inputs cablable of accepting a signal from the cable box he should be fine. Most cable boxes are using component video for HD signal output these days. The cable box however will only let you view HD channels that are offered by the cable company if a station in the area is broadcasting over the air in HD but not on cable he will not be able to view the HD broadcast. If he wanted to view the over the air transmission that is when he would need the high def tuner.

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most common method of connectivity for early HD TV's were componet video connection....these look like 3 rca plugs....i'm at work right now so I am not 100% sure but I think the plugs are colored red, gree, blue. different from normal video and audio which are colored yellow for vidio and red and white for audio.

to get HD into a legacy TV with componet video connections, need to make sure your signal sources has componet video connections available to send the signal to your TV.

Newer TVs use HDMI, which look like a large USB connection. There was a connection type inbetween tha poped up for a while, I forgot the name of it, but it looks likke a large VGA connection simlar to that used on VGA cards.

In either case, you need to make sure the cable box, or sat box has the connection you need.

You will not get HD thru an SVIDEO connection.

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In reference to what speakerfritz said, "Newer TVs use HDMI, which look like a large USB connection. There was a connection type inbetween tha poped up for a while, I forgot the name of it, but it looks likke a large VGA connection simlar to that used on VGA cards." The cable he is refering to is a DVI cable. The difference between a DVI and HDMI cable, is the DVI cable is video only, which means if you use the DVI cable you will still need the red and white audio cables as the DVI cable does not transmit audio. However, the HDMI cable is one cable that transmits video and audio.

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Thanks for your responses. I know all about the cables, I hooked up my Sony HDTV. Unlike his TV, mine came HDTV ready. So I just wondered about the actual cable box itself, if that would be sufficient.

That does make sense about only being able to get cable broadcasts & not OTA. I'll have him check into the HD box... any idea on what those are running now?

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