LCD Plasma TV Reviews

What is Component Video in television industry?

Component video consists of three signals in three pairs of wires. First is the luminance or brightness signal( Y component) which is the video in black and white. The other two are color difference signals. Blue component is B-Y, the red component is R-Y. The advantage of using component is lesser bandwidth requirement and improved image quality than composite video signal. Most of the DVD players have component video connectivity. Almost all TVs even standard definition TV in 29” have component video input. If your video is VHS then it is already in composite. So you cannot expect any improvement over component video. But DVD is in component video color space, i.e YUV. So for viewing DVD is better over component video connection.

In analog video format, the following is the order of increasing quality.

Composite video < S-Video < Component video

When compare with HDMI and component it is just comparing analog with digital. So naturally HDMI will be better looking than component.

In real situations we cannot conclude which is better. Because the video source material, your video device dtermines which will be better. In digital connectivity the digital to analog conversion is eliminated. But there are still some kind of scaling is involved to match the display. It is digital to digital. But we cannot be sure that digital to digital conversion will be better than digital to analog conversion. These all depends on the source material, native resolution of the display etc.