High Def Delight

Analog breakdown: Composite, component, S-Video, oh my!

by Christopher Swenson on July 4th, 2008

One of the biggest sources of confusion to many HDTV buyers is all of the cables. Many of us HD-ready folks have gone over to relatives and friends house only to see the most dreaded of all cables hooked up to their gorgeous new 46" HDTV:

It’s gonna be okay.

Well, first off, what’s so wrong with seeing the trusted ol’ composite cables? Well, first off, composite cable is really just a single channel of NTSC video thrown onto the yellow cable, with the audio split between the two white and red cables. In other words, the video information is all mixed together into a single cable, but the poor quality audio is split between two cables! And since it is transmitting NTSC video, you’re limited to a 480i video experience, and the mixing in the video cable (no separation of color information) causes the colors to be washed and mucked up.

This is all good and fine for VHS tapes and analog cable, both of which are nearly dead. But even DVD-quality is beyond composite cables.

What about S-Video cables? They have such a neat name, so must be better, right? Well, they are better: they separate the video into two channels (essentially a brightness and a color channel), which makes the signal much more stable and the color much better. But it’s still limited to 480i video. It’s still better than composite if that’s your only other option.

Then along comes component cabling: this is some good stuff. Component means that it breaks up the video signal into three component parts: one brightness and two color channels, giving you a rich color spectrum. Since it’s analog, it can run pretty much any video resolution (as long as the cable has thick enough shielding to protect it from outside electromagnetic interference, and the copper inside is thick enough to support the faster signals). This is the first of these cables to support true HD resolutions. If you are going with analog cables, component is about as good as it gets.

There are slightly better analog video options, like some 5-cable component systems used in professional video, as well as VGA, but the primary difference between these and component is the separation of signaling from the video channels. For most people, it makes nearly no difference.

But all of the above cables share one common flaw: they’re all analog. Most of us nowadays have a digital HDTV: LCD, plasma, DLP, or projector. This means there are two problems: the signal is going to have to be converted to a digital one anyways by the display, and the nature of the analog signal means that there may be syncing problems: getting the individual pixels interpreted from the video cable and lined up with the pixels of the display. The first problem of analog conversion you can’t do anything about. The second problem is why you sometimes get weird blurry text on your screen, especially with your HTPC. The only way to get around the syncing problem is to use quality cables and to use your display’s auto-sync feature to try to find the edges of the video signal appropriately.

Hope this clears up some of the confusion with your analog cabling options. Coming soon: audio and digital video!

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POSTED IN: Cable, HD Content, Home Theater