An HDMI Cable: Most Essential Tool for Your TV Setup

Posted by Jennifer Truong on June 7th, 2019

The purpose of technology is to make your life simpler. But if you have gone to buy a new TV or a streaming box in the past couple of years, you know that there is nothing simple about it. If you look at the features and specifications, you will see a lot of phrases, which seem to be self-explanatory but are definitely not.

Let’s attempt to figure out the multiple devices that are available and navigate how to get the most of them, what cables to use, etc.

Display Resolution:

HD Ready [720p (1280x720 pixels)] sounds pretty good until you do some basic research and realize that’s not the same as Full HD [1080p (1920x1080 pixels)]. Then as you go for a much higher resolution than that, you get 4K and 8K displays. 8K is not mainstream yet, so we don’t have to worry about that now.

The “p” that you see here after 720 and 1080 refers to ‘progressive scan’. This, along with the screen refresh rate, decides the potential smoothness of your display. The refresh rate is generally 30 Hertz. Refresh rate means frames per second. This applies to standard, mid-range TV displays.

If you scale up to 4K resolution with High Dynamic Range, your TV will have 60 Hertz refresh rate. However, it is interesting to note that 4K can refresh up to 240 Hertz.next up, is the technology or streaming solutions that go into these TVs.

Technology/Streaming Solutions:

Major TV brands nowadays have operating systems for their televisions. LG has WebOS, Samsung has Tizen, and Sony has Android TV (it previously used to rely on Sony Internet TV apps). These operating systems are why you have SmartTVs now. They generally tend to have most of the streaming services on them, so you should be able to watch your TV shows easily. However, some of them might not have certain apps or the apps can be laggy and annoying to use. Then you need to plug in a streaming device.

Streaming devices come in all shapes and sizes. Some are just slightly larger than a thumb drive and have an HDMI connector, which you can directly plug right into the TV, while some are circular or in the shape of a small box. These, generally connect to the TV via cables. In this article, we are going to focus on a specific type of connector: the HDMI cable.

Connectors:

HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface, and it is the digital standard. HDMI cables are the upgrade we got from the RCA cables, which could not carry both, audio and video, in one cable. HDMI cables can carry both sound and video with just one cable and therefore only requires one port.

HDMI cords are great when it comes to decluttering. Before HDMI cables, if you wanted to connect anything to your TV, it required separate audio and video cables. More cables mean more ports. While having more ports is always beneficial, and there is no downside to it, it does take up real estate on the TV. Analog ports have to be more than one, to plug in a single device, so they take up more space too. This means there is less space for HDMI or USB ports, which are newer connectors and are able to transfer data, better and faster.

With the multiple above-mentioned streaming devices available and new ones coming out often enough, you might need more than one HDMI port to plug them into.

But you are not going to be attaching just a streaming device to your TV. Most TVs come with pretty terrible speakers. And if you have a great 4k display, the content you watch deserves to have equally great audio. This is where soundbars come in. One of the newer types of HDMI cords that have come out is HDMI ARC or Audio Return Channel. So this one cable that could send, both audio and video to your TV, can now return audio and give the output from a soundbar.

Concluding:

At the end of the day, simply having a TV with the best resolution or access to a number of streaming services is not going to guarantee an incredible viewing experience. You will need the right HDMI cord to make things work together and avoid tripping on a bunch of wires.