Question: What Type of TV Do I Need To Use With a Blu-ray or HD-DVD Player or Recorder?
NOTICE: HD-DVD is now officially discontinued. However, information on HD-DVD, and its comparison to Blu-ray, is still contained in this article for historical purposes, as well as the fact that there are still many HD-DVD player owners, and HD-DVD players and discs will continue to be sold and traded on the secondary market for some time.
Answer: Although both Blu-ray and HD-DVD players can be connected and used with any Television that has at least Composite video inputs, the only way to access high definition content and resolution is through either the HDMI connection, or Component Video connections. In other words, you need an HD-Compatible television to see the benefits of either Blu-ray or HD-DVD.
NOTE: Although, currently, high definition resolution can be accessed using the Component Video connections of an Blu-ray or HD-DVD player, this is at the movie studios' discretion. In the future, discs may be encoded to allow access to high definition resolution only via the HDMI connection.
The reason for this is that although the Component Video connections allow owners of older, pre-HDMI, or DVI-HDTV-equipped, HDTVs to enjoy the benefits of Blu-ray and HD-DVD, video signals traveling through component connections are more easily pirated that than those the travel through the digitally copy-protected signal traveling through an HDMI connection.
