HDMI to DVI adapter?

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.

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.

Unkie Jeff -

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

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 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!!