HDMI to DVI adapter?

I have bought at least 30 cables from them and no problems - ranging from cat 6 to analog audio to HDMI.

The do see HDMI/DVI adapters

Did you get the 24 or the 28 AWG? I'm looking at a 15' run.

Actually I bought a 25' DVI to HDMI cable from Monoprice and it's very good, originally had a VGA to VGA line from our computer to our 46" HDTV but the pic was lousy, the 25' DVI to HDMI made a world of difference.. I was very suprised at the quality for the price. I'd buy from them again without hesitation..

very few, even over at AVSFORUM.com have problems with monoprice.

True, it is really hard to accept so much for so little(dollars).

Anyone have experience with monoprice.com cables? Looking at an hdmi to dvi cable. They have a few inexpensive options. Wondering if anyone has tried these, and if they've seen differences between AWG sizes.

Thanks

Unkie jeff-

Glad to hear listening and viewing are tickling your fancy. Excellent!

Thanks for the hot tip on the HDMI cable! Will-dooski, soon. Sounds like a great idea. One problem for me: the folks who promised me a Pioneer Pro Elite 60'' Kuro jobbie can't seem to deliver. Bought it 12/24/07; they charged the card and the whole nine yards, but never could deliver. My sales associate say the unit is so popular and scarce that he had two literally swiped out from under him by unscrupulous salespeople. (Is there no honor among salesmen?) He swears he'll have one here by next friday (yeah, sure), and he did refund the charge to the card very promptly, so I'm no longer out-of-pocket for an item that has not been delivered yet.

Still, I've got this Samsung BD UP-5000 dual format player which I just bought and can't friggin' test out because I have no hi-def TV that accepts HDMI input. If you've followed the threads on the AVS Forum about this player, it is somewhat hit and miss about playing Fox movie titles. I'd like to verify I got one that plays all titles (some do), but must wait until my silly Pioneer Kuro arrives (I'm holding my breath. Really.)

I'll keep you posted. Hopefully, I'll get my TV soon and can start checking things out regarding the various HDMI cables. I need some HiFi Tuning fuses from the Cable Company, so I'll just rent the Wireworld and Audioquest big boy HDMI cables and compare them as well. I'll simply return them when done (cue evil chuckle) and use the mandatory 10% charge for in-store credit to get the HiFi Tuning fuses. (I hope it is still only 10% they charge; I haven't done any cable comparisons through the CC in about 15 years, so things could be different, i.e., more expensive. I hope not. We'll see.)

But all must await the arrival of the Kuro. Like I said earlier, I'll keep ya posted.

All the best! And........

HAPPY LISTENING/VIEWING!!

Winston;

Yes. Over at AVSFORUM.com there are many who lament the HDMI-thing that has become the 'norm'

---I almost feel like the (jarhead) tube guy who hates the transistor(which,I am...)

Suggestion: Watch the occasional auction where the guy starts at $1.00 who claims he 'bought out' all of the Verastarr cables and get his DVI/HDMI cable for roughly $85.00.

Compare this with what you got.

Yes, of late, my listening/viewing has been happy.

Unkie Jeff-

You are so very right about the best connector being NO connector! I couldn't agree with you more.

I'll be comparing the Better Cables Silver Serpent HDMI with a BJC HDMI in a few days or so. We'll see if there is any difference.

But I can tell you that the greatest home theatre image anyone in our little 'group' has ever seen was on a Sony RP-LCD with a Kimbre Kable DVI cable connected to a Marantz DV-8400. On the movie "Solar Max", the image of the sun burnin' and turnin' literally hung out in space in full 3D about two feet in front of the Sony TV, slowly rotating in utter resolution. It was like the sun literally came out of the TV and just hung there in front of us, slowly turning. All of us had to pick our jaws up off the floor after that. No one could believe what we had just seen, so we watched it again, immediately. Same thing happened. We were blown away, pure and simple. Next we watched a DVD of the remastered "Alien", as described below. Another mind-blowing experience beyond anything we had ever seen or imagined possible from in-home video.

A couple of years later, when one of our group got a new TV and DVD player, supposedly better than the models I owned and that we had creamed our jeans about a year or two earlier (as described above), and both from the same manufacturers (RP-LCD TV from Sony; top-of-the-line upscaling DVD player from Marantz), we decided to compare the performance of the newer HDMI-based system versus my two year old TV/DVD combo described above. It wasn't even close: the DVI picture on my old Sony/Marantz/DVI combo clearly topped my friend's new HDMI-based system on the identical source material ("Solar Max"; "Alien"; and some Hi-Def skiing video that was really spectacular!)

For clarification, when we first watched my TV/DVD combo described above, we had just seen "Alien": The Director's Cut, in the movie theatre only a few days before seeing it on my then-new DVI-based system. At the movies we had sat really close just because we wanted to see every detail to compare with the Sony TV/DVD player I had just bought back then. To our utter amazement, DVI-based playback was significantly better than the movie house experience, and when a year or so later we compared these same DVDs on the newer HDMI-based system, the DVI-based system's performance clearly bested the newer HDMI-based picture. Now, mind you, this was very, very early HDMI, possibly some of the first units that offered it. But the difference was significant, thus causing me to seek the performance of a DVI cable in an HDMI format. As far as I was concerned, HDMI was a giant leap backward, and utterly unacceptable compared to a DVI-based viewing experience.

If you look, you'll see I posted requests for someone to help me make a DIY HDMI cable that deleted the audio information from the signal, thus sending only video signal and thereby hopefully matching or exceeding the performance we got using that old Kimber Kable DVI cable that rocked our video world so strongly. No chance. The HDMI interface would require a digital engineer to split and segregate out the various signals that the HDMI-based system passes along its individual wires. Oh well!

Yet my curiosity still compelled me to inquire if anyone had tried using a DVI cable in an HDMI format (with adaptor cables at both ends --yeech!, if such a comparison is possible.) If DVI still bested HDMI in this circumstance, even with HDMI going straight in as opposed to the DVI cable using TWO adaptor connectors, then the superiority of DVI for video transfer would be so resounding, so complete, so very utter, that we might get a few digital engineers and cable makers out there to design a cable that was basically a DVI cable, but with HDMI ends (i.e., no adaptor connectors and no audio signal.) That's what this was all about. Nothing more. Just a crazed attempt to optimize my video set-up, that's all.

Thanks for all your posts. They are appreciated. And....

HAPPY LISTENING/VIEWING!!

Yes, I so much do like the robust DVI connector that I am sorry they didn't stick with it when they decided to include audio and came up with HDMI. My own NEC 50XM5 Plasma monitor has no speakers so I am not at all interested in a cable to it that includes audio, anyway.

Winston, I would suspect that any improvement you might somehow find in a cable will be defeated by using adaptors as they will weaken the signal.

"The more stuff along the way, the more there is to contend with."

I can tell you that my own picture quality does improve a bit when I went from a Radio Shack Gold DVI/HDMI to a Varastarr cable with the same terminations.

Unkie Jeff -

You can use adapters, but only on the DVI side. DVI connector is very robust.

Unkie Jeff-

You may have misunderstood my goal with this query. I am NOT interested in the performance characteristics of the connectors ( I assume they screw up the picture, as connectors do in every other application I can think of.) This is all about testing the cables side-by-side in an identical situation (except for the connectors) to see which format truly is better for video. If you have another way of doing so, let me know, please. Most TVs and DVD players are now HDMI only. I know of no TVs or players that have both HDMI and DVI inputs/outputs which, in turn, would allow us to do a real side-by-side comparison. That would be optimal, but I suspect quite unlikely.

Winston;

Trash the adaptors.

They weigh too much and will sooner or later fatigue you HDMI inputs. This is a real common problem.

Stick with the DVI/HDMI cable.

Have any of you tried using a DVI cable between two HDMI output and input ports (HD player and TV) with an HDMI-to-DVI adaptor at the input end and DVI-to-HDMI adaptor at the DVI cable's output end versus using a plain HDMI cable (forgetting about audio signal for a while.) Basically I'm describing using a DVI cable between a TV and HD player with HDMI only outputs/inputs (i.e., no DVI inputs on either the player or TV, just HDMI.) Is this even possible with HDMI technology? (I believe so.)

I'm trying to determine if the HDMI cable messes up the video output relative to the DVI design which does not run audio interspersed with the video signal down a single conductor. My feeling is that it does, and significantly so. Obviously, in the comparison outlined above, you're adding the artifacts and distortions from a pair of adaptor interfaces when you put the HDMI-to-DVI/DVI-to-HDMI adaptors on the ends of the DVI cable, but that might not be enough to overcome the inherent design flaws of the HDMI design. (I spoke to a noted HDMI cable designer/manufacturer a few days ago who agreed that DVI was a better design for VIDEO only purposes, far exceeding HDMI in potential for video playback due to the mixing of audio and video signals on the HDMI wires. He said convenience was king when HDMI was designed, not performance. HDMI simply did away with lots of cumbersome, confusing wires for audio, making it consumer friendly, but NOT optimized for video.)

So let me know PLEASE if anyone has done this experiment (if such an experiment is possible.) Again, even though it's not fair to compare a DVI cable with HDMI adaptors at both ends vs. an HDMI cable with no adaptors, I believe this test will reveal a lot about the real performance capabilities of HDMI vs. DVI. If DVI still outperforms HDMI when DVI is clearly at a grave disadvantage (with HDMI adaptors at both ends), this will demonstrate the need to designers to get us back to that performance level by making cables that use the HDMI connectors but put a DVI cable in between, shit-canning the audio portion of the HDMI signal for those of us who only want the BEST in video resolution and playback.

Thanks for any input on the question.

HAPPY LISTENING/VIEWING!

Here's a good explanation of how these colorspace issues crop up when going HDMI -> DVI:

http://archive2.avsforum.com/avs-vb/archive/index.php/t-486428.html

Rreckstad,

Sorry I missed your reply.

Changing the output resolution didn't seem to help the issue. My understanding is that the Denon 1920 that I use has only outputs at the extended colorspace supported by HDMI, and doesn't support DVI's slightly reduced colorspace (I think there's only 3 values difference between them).

Consequently I switched back to component. The DVI input on the TV is sitting unused at the moment.

Some DVD players let you select the color palette to use, and some may autodetect. Just something to watch for - if you notice what appears to be pixelation during dark passages you'll know exactly what the problem is (took me forever to figure it out!)

AQ makes good quality DVI->HDMI and HDMI->DVI versions of the adapter. I use one of each in my system to/from my Lumagen Scaler and RPTV with good results. I don't have the color space issue outputting 480p from my transport into my scaler and then scaling to 1080p and using 1:1 bitmapping mode (my DLP RPTV supports this) which allows the scaler to controller all rendering. 7.5IRE pedestal is used throughout.

I got one (HDMI to DVI) made by MIT. It works great with my Sony PS3. Running audio separately is fine. Although at 1080i (that my TV is only capable of), the picture still looks really great.

HudsonHawk-

could the color space problem be solved by running at 1080i instead of 1080p? Just curious as to what you were outputting at when the problems occurred. Since it didn't work out for you, what have you done instead?

Thanks

Thanks everyone.

There's boatloads of both adaptors and 1-piece HDMI/DVI cables out there, so pick one that meets your price critera and have at it.

The only issue you might run into is color space. DVI has a slightly smaller color space than HDMI, so with certain combinations of players and TV's you might run into black level clipping issues (it'll appear as black blocks during dark parts of movies).

I was using a DVI -> HDMI adapter with my tv, but it didn't work out.

I faced the same problem, too. I found an HDMI to DVI cable by searching the internet. Works fine. You must run audio separately.

I do it - no problems, except you have to run seperate audio as you mention.