How to hook up an HDTV

Once you've bought your new HDTV, had it delivered, and unpacked it, you'll be desperate to hook it up and get watching. If you have a TV with an integrated HD tuner and only plan to watch off-air channels, connecting it up is a simple as plugging in an antennae and switching the TV on.

If you have and external tuner, whether it's for off-air, cable, or satellite HDTV, you'll need to connect it to your HDTV. There are three different types of interface that you can use to hook up your HDTV to your tuner; HDMI, DVI, and component. If you've bought your HDTV recently, you'll almost certainly have HDMI or DVI inputs, older HDTVs tend to have component inputs.

The first thing to check is that you have matching inputs on your tuner box and TV. If you only have one pair of matching inputs, you'll have to use those. If you have no matching inputs, you'll need an adapter to convert the signal, such as a DVI to HDMI adapter. If you have more than one pair of matching inputs, you'll need to choose which to use. Your choice will depend on a number of things. If you have matching HDMI input and output, HDMI will reduce cable clutter as it carries both audio and video signals. However, if you have an HDMI DVD player, you may want to use the HDMI port on your TV to connect to the DVD player, and use DVI or component for the TV.

There is one other factor to consider, HDCP — High-bandwidth Data Copy Protection. HDCP is an encryption technology which may be used at some stage to limit the way in which you can view HDTV or high definition video on TVs which don't have HDCP-compliant inputs i.e. DVD-D or HDMI. At the moment, this is most likely to apply to Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, rather than TV broadcasts, although some studios, notably Sony, have said they won't place restrictions on early Blu-ray releases. If possible you should connect a Blu-ray or HD-DVD device to your TV using HDMI or DVI-D to avoid possible problems in the future, even if it means connecting your TV to your tuner using the component connectors. Signal quality over component is imperceptibly different from that over HDMI and DVI-D, so you'll lose nothing from doing it that way.