Quote:
Originally Posted by DeathsHand
which is an all digital audio/video transfer, offering a (supposedly) better picture with less of a chance for interference (from what, I don't know)...
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It's supposed better picture come from the fact 99.9% of people on the internet have no idea what they're talking about. It has to do with the logic that a digital signal traveling over a digital cable and being displayed on a digital TV sends a pure signal that is never once converted. The reality is quite different. The signal still passed through numerous processors, encoders, decoders, and scalers before it ever finally hits its destination. Your picture quality is dependent on the hardware the device is using, both the one that is sending, and the one that is receiving, and how well it can handle the various tasks without loss of quality. On certain TVs, analog will look better, and on others, HDMI looks better. Even so, by better, if you had both side-by-side, you would still struggle to see the differences.
The main benefit to HDMI is it's a one-cable-does-all solution. Aside from convenience, there is 0.000% reason to use HDMI on today's consoles. In fact, the only consumer products right now that benefit from HDMI are HD DVD players. HDMI is required to send the new HD audio signals, and HD DVD players all decode them at the source (player) before output. It's also beneficial if you have a HDMI 1.3 Blu-ray player and a new audio receiver which can decode the compressed signals. But currently that is the one and only benefit to using HDMI, and it only applies to HD DVD players (outputting to any HDMI receiver that accepts audio), and Blu-ray players (HDMI 1.3 and audio receivers that can decode TrueHD and DTS-HD MA).
All other features of HDMI to include HDMI 1.3 are not used in any way shape or form right now, nor will they be for a while.