I’m here to quickly dispel a myth — that you have to use a digital cable of some sort to hook up HDTV. It’s complete and utter crap. If you have a good component cable (you’ll need three video jacks, the inputs/outputs are usually colored green, blue, and red, and their names are…oh lord, I forget, one is “Pbr+” and so on…and I believe you need two audio jacks, so a grand total of five jacks, I think, so five cables…each video cable sends a different number of primary colors to the screen, three combined give you a perfect picture).
In fact, many people claim that using component cables to hook up their HDTVs not only gives them a great HD picture (it does, I tried it with mine, and stuck with the digital cable for simplicity’s sake), but it also displays regular TV channels more crisply (I cannot verify this statement; both seemed to deliver relatively the same quality of SDTV — Standard Definition TV).
Comcast actually uses component cables when they come to hook up an HD box to an HDTV. At least, they’ve done it to another TV here, and three others in the same vicinity I know about. So if you’d rather stick to component cables, don’t be afraid to do so, the HD picture is, honestly, as perfectly sharp and clear as with a digital cable, and, as I said, some people maintain that rigging your set this way gives you better standard TV channels.