Home Theatre Cable Tips: Component Cables

Component cables look similar to RCA or Composite cables, however the signal improvement with component cables is substantial. Home Theater component cables divide the image from the system into three separate colors for the best possible picture, where as composite cables are the yellow (video) and red, white (audio) connections that come standard with game systems these days. Component video improves the picture quality by not only separating the color from the black-and-white portions of the picture but by further splitting the color information into two color-difference signals. When the home theater projector signal is split up in this way, you get an unfiltered, uninterrupted image, with better resolution and greatly improved color saturation. This is why component video is the predominant method of hookup from HDTV set-top decoders to HDTVs.