Borrow one from a friend and try it.

Amazon and Monoprice are good internet sources to buy hdmi and other kinds of cabling. Unlike most stores, they don't rip you off.

A cable that's $5 from one of these two could be $20 or $30 at Best Buy or other retailers.

ok, long story short. we have SD cable service. i was told that i could get a HD digital tuner box or mini tuner and it would work in HD. even if we dont pay for HD. comcast tech said so. i tried it and it was SD. i called customer service and they gave me free HD signal on the mini tuner. what the heck? free? so i decided to get a 2nd HD dta and hook it up just so i could use the SD hdmi thruput and what do you know? it also works in HD. so that sort of shoots down my quest to find out about SD-hdmi. but, free hd on 2 tuner is nice.

This post was edited by cavell on Wed, Dec 24, 14 at 13:23

This is actually possible. The SD tuner provides the date while the HD box up-scales the quality to an almost real hd quality. Everything else will actually depend on how good your TV is on displaying up-scaled content.

What is the big deal about HD? I have had it for the past 6 years and your eyes get use to it and before u know it, it looks just normal. BTW, i got use to it within the first year. The next big thing is 4K, and following that its OLED and etc and etc...They have it all available now, but they are feeding us one at a time so they can make more money.

Legally - not that the cable industry is actually interested in doing anything legally - you have a *right* to receive local broadcast channels at their native, HD resolution, no matter which cable plan you have. If you are paying for any cable plan, you should be able to get the Clear QAM version of local broadcast channels, on as many TVs as you want, too. Granted this might mean you have to switch to a different input on your TV to see them instead of through the converter box, and use a splitter to divide the signals. Also, they might move them around in the Clear QAM slots and not supply any metadata, so you'll have to program the channel names yourself. When I switched to OTA it was something of a revelation that not only did my TV auto-program channel IDs, but the name of the current program also shows up on the screen information.

This could explain why the cable company seems (?) to be telling you 2 different things.

I read that the prices of HDMI cables are not indicative of their performance, but I've experienced differently. I bought the cheapest cables I could find (~$5) and used it to connect my Roku to our TV. When we were streaming Netflix, my wife and I noticed that the audio was occaisionally cutting out. Initially we thought it was due to a Netflix outage or network connection, but after a while I suspected differently. I ordered these shielded cables from www.lowvoltagesupply.com and voila! Everything works without hiccups. Awesome!

Thank you!