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General discussion

Need help connecting basic cable to older plasma screen.

Jan 29, 2012 10:43AM PST

I have a Panasonic TH-42PW5 plasma from around 2001 and I'm trying to figure out if it's possible to hook up my basic cable to it with some sort of adapter or converter?? I no longer have a cable box(time warner got so greedy that I had to step down to basic cable). The plasma has no Cable Antenna input or HDMI(yeah, it's old). It does have component RGB in, AV in w/ S-Video, PC in and Serial. Any help is much appreciated!

Discussion is locked

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TV Demodulator
Jan 30, 2012 7:27PM PST

If you have a VCR, check it for A/V outputs. You can hook up the cable to the VCR and use it as a TV tuner to watch analog cable channels.

Otherwise, you would have to purchase something like this to get it to work.

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Thank you, found a solution.
Jan 31, 2012 12:51AM PST

In order to get the best possible picture quality from the plasma screen I wanted to use the component RGB(best connection on this model) so the demodulator box was not my preferred solution. I researched like crazy and finally found a DVD/VCR combo player made by Panasonic(Model#DMR-EZ48V) that still has a TV tuner inside(screw-in cable IN) as well as an RGB out to the plasma. I'm getting mostly HD channels with this set-up and it looks quite good. Thanks again for your help.