I am in the process of upgrading my HT equipment and one of the things on my list was sending my DVD player and my cable box to my receiver via HDMI.

The first thing I did this evening was to test the signal from my HD box straight into my tv to see just how much better it would be over HDMI vs component video... to my surprise, the picture is actually WORSE... not just a little worse but substantially so... ghosting (badly) and a lot more "artifacts", i think that is the right word.

All of which went away when I went back to the component cables...

I have a samsung plasma 5053.

Any ideas on why it would be that way? am I setting something wrong?
currently box is outputting 480p, 720p and 1080i, same settings for both HDMI and component

I have been using component and HDMI on my Panny Plasma for one year and see little difference between component and HDMI- I think component is just as good on a lot of Displays.

May be a bad cable.

I have a s5053 and it looks great with HDMI, though I did not notice much difference compared with component other than HDMI is 1 cable instead of 5 component connections

I have a DLp and did a comparison between DVI and Component and notice little differences. The DVI connection made the edges a little sharper, but washed out the color a little.

Interesting thread. I have a Panasonic AE700 front projector, shooting a 9' screen, and comparing the HDMI output of my DVD player (Denon, with a line-doubler) to the component outputs also doesn't reveal any noticeable difference.

Weird.. how could HDMI cause a "ghosting" effect? Ghosting is an analog symptom, usually a sign of multipath reception. I suppose it could theoretically also be induced by some weird analog cabling problem too. But, I don't see how going to a digital cable between the STB and the TV could even theoretically cause "ghosting". Errors in the digital connection would cause things like sparkles in the picture, or dropouts.

Could there be some DVI or HDCP handshaking issues forcing the cable box to downres, and then the plasma has to rescale back up, so two things degrading the picture. May not be a pure DRM issue, but I think there may be some additional handshaking of supported resolutions, is it called EDID? Lots of people have had problems getting HTPC's to output at full-panel resolutions to digital TV monitors. Perhaps double-check what resolution the TV is actually getting, if it can show that.

I don't know about ghosting in the analog sense, but just having gotten digital cable, there is some horrible "ringing" on many of of the distinct vertical edges on some SD channels which I'm sure is due to excessive compression. It may also be exacerbated or emphasized by poor scaling or edge enhancement downstream. The cable box is digital simulcast only, so it's digital and it's definitely something visible - my first thought was "looks like ghosting"...

Weird.. how could HDMI cause a "ghosting" effect? Ghosting is an analog symptom, usually a sign of multipath reception.

Perhaps they aren't really ghosts but artifacts of an 'sharpness' setting for that input that is way out of adjustment.

I went through some more settings just to confirm exactly what the problem could be.

First thought was that my settings for HDMI input were way different than the component settings... nope... When I customized the "movie" setting for component, those settings carried over to the HDMI input.. That probably isnt a good thing really as now I have to customize a different "pre set" in order to change the picture for different inputs.

Other than that, everything is exactly the same moving from hdmi to component, output resolutions are the same... tv is responding the same (no real "settings" to look at, like what it is actually displaying)

As far as ghosting... the exact issue was during a transformers commercial. When the word "transformer" came on the screen it started really large, then shrunk to fit the screen like a fade in effect. The letters FORM were visible well after they should have disappeared, like several seconds, essentially the whole time the screen was black... furthermore, they were only on the screen for milliseconds... When I switched back to component cables there were no such problems.

Also, during the black parts of the commercial there were really bad "blocks" of different colors of black, like a lego puzzle... with component they were completely smooth and natural.

I honestly have NO clue what is up... oh and i tried two different sets of HDMI cables.