The HDCP chain

To gain entry to the HD party it’s likely you’ll need to upgrade more than just your monitor. Both ends of the connection must be HDCP-compliant for the system to work.

To watch a Blu-ray or HD-DVD disc on your PC you’ll need not only the relevant optical disc drive, but a sufficiently powerful CPU, plenty of system memory, a compatible operating system, an HDCP-compliant graphics card with drivers that support the HDCP function, some HD playback software and an HDCP-compliant monitor. The chances of your PC supporting all of this out of the box are very slim.

The easiest way to set up such a system is to buy one ready-made: Sony’s Vaio VGN-AR11S, for example, comes with everything you need to play back Blu-ray movies (if you can find one) on its built-in display and provides an HDCP-compliant HDMI port for connection to external monitors. Toshiba’s Qosmio G30-163 offers a similar solution for fans of HD-DVD.

Unfortunately, you can’t just assume that everything containing a Blu-ray drive will be able to play back Blu-ray movies: unlike its notebook cousin, Sony’s Blu-ray-enabled desktop PC, the Vaio VGC-RC204, does not have HDCP-enabled outputs so is no use for Blu-ray movies.

Some early ‘HDCP-enabled’ graphics cards turned out not to be HDCP-compliant at all. Although the basic designs were capable of HDCP when fitted with the correct additional hardware (see How HDCP works), no one actually bothered to incorporate the necessary components.

This left customers thinking they had HDCP-capable products when they did not.
Some of the most recent graphics cards, however, are fully HDCP-compliant.

These include versions based on ATI’s mid-range X1600 chipset and fitted with HDMI ports, while Nvidia’s offerings are high-end cards including the monstrous dual-GPU Geforce 7950GX2 and more recently some single-core 7900-series models.

While playback software is available from vendors such as Cyberlink and Intervideo, HD versions of their playback software, PowerDVD and WinDVD are currently restricted to OEM versions that are only bundled with complete HD systems.

You can’t just go out and buy the software on its own and use it with your own Blu-ray or HD-DVD drive.

If you want to check your hardware for readiness, you can use Cyberlink’s BD/HD Advisor (currently in beta). We used it to verify that the monitors in this feature are HDCP-compliant – they all passed the test, while every other monitor we had in the PCW Labs did not.

This article is part of a group test of HDCP Vista-ready TFT monitors.
See also
Dell 3007WFP
Samsung SM205BW
Samsung SM215TW
Sony MFM-HT205
Viewsonic VP233wb
How we tested the monitors
How HDCP works

Performance graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downloads

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