How to Get More Than One HDMI Port on Your TV
I finally got back home to Bonaire last night, and had my new PS3 waiting for me. I installed it using the regular composite video cable the PS3 comes with on the Samsung 32” LCD TV in my bedroom. I used the composite video cable because the TV only has one HDMI port, and that port was already in use by my DVD player.
Sure, I could have just gone and disconnected the DVD player, and used the PS3 to play DVDs instead, but that is a suboptimal solution, because the user interface for DVD playback on the PS3, well, sucks. Also, I have the DVD functionality programmed into my universal remote, and am too lazy to figure out if there’s a way to get the remote to work on the PS3.
I had anticipated this issue some weeks back, and had gone shopping on-line to find an affordable HDMI switch, as surely such an item must exist. And indeed, I found several options. I finally settled on a 5-port HDMI switch
That switch arrived today, so I unpacked it, rewired things, and found that for some reason the PS3 would not output image data onto the HDMI connection. Turned out to be a configuration issue in the PS3, so I switched back to the composite video view (which, incidentally, was really ugly relative to what I knew the PS3 could do - fuzzy and chunky graphics at 480 lines of resolution - yuck! Oh how spoiled we’ve become!), and reconfigured the PS3 to use HDMI as the output. My Samsung TV could do 720p and 1080i resolutions, testing showed, so I enabled that, and was off and running, and things looked oh so much better.
However, this would not have been possible without the 5-port HDMI switch I found at Amazon.com - it’s still not cheap at $124.99, but it works like a dream. More specifically, it auto-senses which of the five HDMI inputs have an active signal, and if it’s only one, switches to use that input automatically. That means it is wife-safe too. My wife is no dummy, but she hates it when she has to take extra steps to get something working like it used to, and with the 5-port HDMI switch, if she turns on the DVD player, and the PS3 is off (as it would likely be), it will all just work as it did before.
The 5-port HDMI switch is made by Monoprice, and the model number is HDX-501. It has five HDMI inputs, and one HDMI output. The specifications say it supports 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p video formats, and that it also supports HDCP compliant video devices - something that is necessary for both 1080p output for Blu-ray movies on the PS3 as well as for some of Windows Vista’s forthcoming features. The unit comes with a remote controls, and a pair of AAA batteries are included as well.
I give the Monoprice HDX-501 HDMI Switch a 9.5 out of 10.0 on my Richter Scale. The only way to improve on it would be a lower price.
An interesting techie anecdote about HDMI switches, incidentally. I was in Tokyo last week, and visited Akihabara, the Tokyo electronics district, where every gadget known to man can be purchased. However, in asking around (using my Japanese-speaking guide, Junko) I was unable to locate any HDMI switches of any sort. We visited about a half dozen stores and stands, and in the final shop, that of one of the larger computer sellers in Akihabara, we were told point blank that while they knew HDMI switches existed, they did not yet exist in Japan. I found that statement amusing, since Japan is always apparently at the bleeding edge of technology, and the U.S. trails behind. Here was a case that appeared to be the opposite. In any event, in the U.S. you can definitely find HDMI switches. Ones that work well, at that.
