CurtPalme.com Home Theater Forum

[andrewhuculak@hotmail.com]

I need to send a HDMI signal to both my LCD TV and my projector sometimes at the same time.

Any experience out there with Monoprice offerings?

[mtmelvin]

I used Monoprice's 4x2 HDMI (product ID 5312) switcher for a couple of years. My feeling is that for less than $60 it's an excellent product. Compared to a "good" matrix switcher it's kind of a piece of junk, but it gets the job done at a very reasonable price.

The main drawbacks to this unit are:

When making any route whatsoever, all outputs blank out for several seconds. This is consistent and it never stops being annoying.

IR control is a little bit unreliable, and the included remote is garbage. I struggled with this for a long time. I had a heck of a time trying to get my URC to learn the commands from the crappy included remote. It just wasn't happening. Finally, after lots of online research, I found a recommendation to try learning it from another universal remote. I also have a Logitech Harmony 550 and fortunately Logitech has a driver for it... either that or I learned it into the Harmony. Honestly I can't remember now. But I ended up using the Harmony remote to learn the URC, and that worked quite well.

Serial control worked well, at least for me.

I found that I would have to reboot this switcher on occasion. Not frequently, but occasionally. I kinda expected this because it is so inexpensive, so I wasn't too annoyed about this.

Overall, it's a great product for the price. To get a better HDMI matrix you would need to spend at least a few hundred dollars. I didn't find that it degraded the signal at all, but it was not in line before my G90, so I didn't do any "reference" viewing with it.

I'm not sure which switcher you are considering, so your experience could be totally different. I'm pretty sure that Monoprice doesn't design or manufacture these products, so you may have different results with another one of their switchers.

Hope this helps.

-Mark