Here’s a word of warning on Samsung and DVI to HDMI
I’m currently sporting two high performance Samsung devices, a Galaxy S II and Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. Both are more capable of playing video than my laptop, so I figured I’d get the HDMI adapters for them and rock a bit of high profile 1080p h264 video. Turns out that’s not as simple as it sounds. After trying multiple things to get anything besides 640 x 480 out of the two, I went online and searched around a bit. Turns out that this is a universal problem with Samsung devices when a DVI to HDMI adapter is used to connect HDMI cables to DVI screens. DVI and HDMI are basically the same thing (without audio in case of DVI), and the adapters are purely physical adapters with no internal components that alter the signal, so this is the first devices I’ve ever seen to take issue with it. I’ve had a PS3, laptop, iPad, WD media player box, and a camera hooked up to this screen using the same DVI to HDMI system, and they’ve all worked. I even tried other cables, all with the same result – naturally, HDMI Is a digital signal after all.
What’s surprising here is that this issue seems to be pretty much universal when it comes to Samsung devices. Having the same problem in a smartphone and a tablet released half a year apart and with different software and different adapters, all without having released software updates to fix it in the mean time. This suggests to me that the issue is so small that it hasn’t reached Samsung’s attention, or the company has simply ignored it. Either way it’s not a fun situation, and it isn’t good PR for Samsung to be outperformed by Apple’s iOS HDMI adapter.
