DVI to component cable, adapter/converter are the right devices which help achieve this kind of conversion. Think about them and make your right decision.
When we talk about DVI to component cable, adapter and converter, it seems that there are a lot of controversy over them. Many people ever bought one home but finally found out that it did not work at all. Are these kinds of small devices available in the electronics stores and worth your money? This is really hard question to answer. If you are looking for one for your PC or Mac to the analogue component display, you’d be very careful before you are making the purchase.
Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a recent relatively advanced video interface standard, which is made to give optimum graphics quality on digital enabled displays like flat panel. When it comes to DVI connector, a lot of people will think it is a DVI-D. However, DVI connector comes with three different variations, namely DVI-D, DVI-A and DVI-I. Among them, DVI-D allows only digital signal, DVI-A transfers only analog signals while DVI-I deal with both. This is a very important basic knowledge you need to bear in mind, which will be very helpful to explain the following matters.
DVI to component converter
If you need to make your DVI-D source work to your analog component display, DVI-D to VGA/RGB/Component video converter might be one of the best options. This is kind of active converter circuit instead of normal type of converter. It can process the signal in DVI-D format and then translates them into analog component. It is quite simple to use and suitable to most of applications. However, the disadvantage is that video converter is quite expensive.
DVI to component cable
Here the DVI connector means DVI-I or DVI-A. As we just mentioned that DVI-D only accept digital signal, it doesn’t make any sense to use such a passive cable here. These kinds of cables usually come with a DVI-I Male to 3 RCA male connectors, namely Red, Green and Blue. HDTV, DVI-I Component Y/pb/ Pr video, satellite TV and some LCD projectors use these cables very often. Its advantages include easy to use and low cost. However, the disadvantage is that this kind of video cable needs your graphics card built in with the component-out function via the DVI-I out. The mechanism behind these cables is that they can extract the TV-out signals from some specific graphics cards to the analog component displays or simply plug up to any component-out devices. But this only can be found in some NonStandard devices, which transmit YPbPr over the DVI-A RGB pins. In addition, your monitor or HDTV must have the component input available.
DVI to component adapter
This adapter is a very good choice too only if your card is some specific models of ATI DVI-I video cards. If so, you can use it to connect to your high definition television easily. However, this video adapter has the same obvious disadvantage with above-mentioned cable – only applying to some certain ATI DVI-I graphics cards. It needs at least two conditions to make it work. One is your cards are of some certain ATI chipset, the other is the video cards are capable of send TV compatible (sync-on-green) signals. It is highly recommended that you’d better make sure whether or not your PC comes with this kind of video cards.
So, does DVI to component cable and adapter sound too good to be true?
The answer is it depends. If your card is ATI chipset instead of others like nVidia, congratulation to you and probably you can find a suitable ATI DVI to component adapter and cable at Radio Shack and Beat Buy easily. However, once again, if you just want to connect your PC video output to HDTV display, chances are that this adapter and cable won’t work for you. What you need is another item like VGA to HDTV converter. Hope this helps.