Most people are aware that having a scart lead gives you a better picture on your television. It also ensures the signal between the TV and another piece of equipment – for example your recordable DVD player – is as good as it can possibly be.
But what happens when you have more than one piece of equipment to cope with? Most items only have a couple of scart sockets on the back of them, so if you need more than this you will run into problems.
And it can easily happen too. Let’s say you have a video recorder, a DVD recorder and a piece of gaming equipment such as a Wii connected to your TV. That adds up to three scart sockets you would need on the back of your TV – and if you only have two you can see that the maths doesn’t add up.
What do you do? Luckily there is a simple answer to this. All you have to do is buy a scart splitter. This is a piece of equipment which acts in much the same way as an extension lead. You have a scart socket at one end, and the cable from that goes into a box. This box normally has two or three scart sockets in it, so you can plug all your scarts into this instead of into the back of the TV.
The good news is that a scart splitter is normally available from the same places you would buy a scart lead from. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money either – normally you will pay around £5 or £6 for one, although there are better ones available that cost a few pounds more.
Some of them have buttons on them so you can control which feed comes through which scart lead. For example if you are recording something you would click the button next to the scart lead for the DVD recorder. Alternatively if you want to play on the Wii, you would need to deselect the DVD recorder and select the Wii scart lead instead.
You can see that having this kind of unit really does pay dividends if you happen to have plenty of equipment that requires scart leads. It doesn’t cost much and it makes life a lot easier as you won’t have to choose which scarts to plug in or unplug at any given time.