A few years back having a single HDMI input on your HD TV was fine as it was more than likely that you only had one or two devices to attach to it, but now most peripherals use HDMI cables to connect to your TV so if you find yourself constantly unplugging and plugging in cables when you want to use your PS3, SKY HD, Xbox, BluRay, FreeSat, etc then you could probably do with buying an HDMI switcher.
These aren’t expensive and for less than a tenner you can save yourself the hassle and have all your kit connected to your TV and breathing new life into you AV set-up. It really is such an easy solution to what can be pretty frustrating if you’re having to yank out cables on a daily basis. It’s also not great practice to be repeatedly plugging an unplugging cables as you can cause damage to the connectors in the cable and on the television.
There are quite a few splitters on the market but the one with the best reviews on Amazon is the Duronic HDS3 Mini 3 Port Gold HDMI Auto Switch which retails at only £7.99 and allows you to connect up to 3 HDMI sources to one high definition display up to FULL HD 1080p and higher resolutions. You may see almost identical looking splitters online but with a different brand name and the fact it they will more than likely be exactly the same kit but just distributed by someone else, but more than likely all made in the same factory.
The switcher is powered by the connected HDMI cable so you don’t need to worry about finding another plug socket and the device auto switches when you turn an HDMI connected device on and as it’s only 5cm by 5cm you’ll hardly notice it. It does have a manual switch too so you can easily flick between several switched-on sources. Have a look at the video below to see it in action.
As you can see it’s a simple bit of tech to use and does exactly what you need for such a small price.
On a technical side the Duronic Switcher uses HDMI v1.3b (Latest/fastest spec) and is HDCP compliant, fully HDMI Certified, and RoHS & CE approved. Some other splitters out there don’t carry all these qualities and so there have been issues with some users not being about to use BT Vision on certain switchers as they need to be HDCP compliant but the Duronic brand has it all and will work for 99.9% of devices.
If you want to find out more then there have a look at the product page on Amazon and decide from there if it’s the solution to your troubles.