brj,
All passive (not powered) splitters are more or less the same; by far the largest difference being the bandwidth for which they are rated. If this is for an HD Cable / dish type of application then I would suggest making sure you have a splitter rated to 1GHz....this isn't to say that if a splitter doesn't have this stamp that it won't perform well; but considering these are under $5 you may as well splurge.
The loss for splitters is based on the number of taps, or how many times you are splitting the signal. This is to say, a 4-way splitter will have twice as much loss as a 2-way, etc.
The only way to have a zero loss splitter is to have an active splitter - one that requires its own power supply. These active types generally have an eq circuit built in to compensate for the loss by boosting the signal back. It adds a tiny bit of noise to the signal, but sometimes this is the only way to get a strong enough signal to your destination. In most cases, the increased strength of the signal quality far outweighs the minuscule increase in noise.
In some ways, you can think of active/passive splitters as being analogous our audio preamplifiers.
Here's an example: Amazon item number B00009WDUG
(this is clearly overkill, just illustrating what I mean)
Ok, hope this helps.
Best,
