[graham-p]

I have a Panasonic TV (Scarts X 2) & (HDMI X 2) with a Humax Digital Box with the same connections and a Panasonic DV Recorder also with same connections.. My son set them up with Scart leads, but I have two HDMI leads which I could use.
Would it be better to take away the Scart leads and replace them with the HDMI leads?

eg HDMI 1 from TV to Digi box & HDMI2 to Recorder.

(I should mention that the TV and Recorder are connected to a Digital aerial - both have inbuilt Freeview - whereas I have connected the Humax Digi Box to an old Sky dish to get Sattelite programmes)

I would appreciate some technical help please

[Sue_Aitch]

You may wish to have a play with this Connection Wizard, but my advice is to read the Instructions your Pannies and Hummy came with too.

[chrisjr]

Lets get the obvious over first. No such animal as a digital aerial. It is an aerial for the reception of signals in the UHF broadcast bands. It isn't even strictly speaking a TV aerial as it doesn't care what the signal is.

Anyway. Using HDMI is the only way to get HD programme content from the attached devices if they are capable of receiving it. The Humax satellite box is probably able to receive the HD channels if it's one of the recent Foxsat models.

Whether it will improve picture quality for everything else is something only you can really decide. In theory it should improve over SCART. Especially if you have set the SCART to the low quality composite video mode rather than the higher quality RGB video mode.

Using SCART the TV is upscaling the images to fill the screen. With HDMI either the Humax/Recorder or TV could be doing the upscaling. This might have an impact on image quality if the TV is significantly better or worse than the source devices (Humax/Recorder).

If you watch HD broadcasts then HDMI is the only option. Otherwise the only thing to do is try it and see what you think gives the best picture quality.

The only other thing to note is that HDMI may not auto switch like SCART does. There is provision in the HDMI spec for the devices at each end of the lead to talk to each other. Your Panasonic recorder may be better at that then the Humax. So you might get auto switching, ie the TV switches to HDMI 1 when you turn on the Humax and to HDMI 2 for the recorder if that is how you connect them.