I’m always excited to get something interesting in the mail, and last night that something was the HDMI-DVI cable I ordered from MonoPrice. I was in for three surprises, two bad and one good.

The good surprise was that it just worked! I was expecting to have to fiddle this, switch that, or whatever. But none of that was needed. I plugged the DVI end into my TV, then plugged the HDMI end into my SA8300HD PVR, and presto blamo, my TV said “Digital In” where previously it had said “YPbBr” (or whatever).

But this is where things went wrong. First of all, I discovered that my television shared input one between the DVI and component connections. I was hoping to free up the component input by using the DVI input, but I can’t do that. Which throws a wrench into my plans to finally hook up my DVD player via component video instead of using its S-Video connection. Grrrr…

Second, the picture quality was not as good using the HDMI-DVI connection. It was like there was a soapy film over the whole picture. I may be able to calibrate this away, but it was disconcerting to say the least. So now that’s exactly what I’m going to do. I’d like to get a good picture working with the DVI input, because eventually I want that to be my only connection to the TV. Or at the very least, I’ll be using it for my PS3 later this year. I guess I’ll need to find a way to switch several component video sources without spending a lot of money.