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HDMI Brands Don't Matter
adeelarshad82 writes "I'm sure most of us looking for an HDMI cable have been in a situation where a store clerk sidles up, offers to help and points to some of the most expensive HDMI cables — because apparently these are 'superior cables' which we all absolutely need for the best possible home theater experience. Well, as it turns out the claims are, for the vast majority of home theater users, utter rubbish. According to tests ran on five different HDMI cables, ranging in price from less than $5 up to more than $100, HDMI brands really don't matter."
For short cable runs, any old HDMI cable will do. When you get into the 50-100 ft lengths, the cable quality absolutely matters.
HDMI signals may be digital, so there's none of the subjective analog concerns, but it's also a real-time signal, which makes it susceptible to even small delays in transmission across the cable. This isn't a concern in a sub-20 ft cable, but becomes noticeable in the cheap longer cables.
shit
For digital signals like HDMI, as long as there is enough data for the receiver to put together a picture, it will form. If there isn't, it will just drop off.
I think a lot of technical people are used to computers and checksums, checkbits, res etc. and think that HDMI is like this. Its not. That's about all I'm going to say because I'm not really qualified and you can read more about it yourself.
My grandpa would be alive today if he had purchased a higher quality HDMI cable.
They didn't cut them in half to see how much was wire or how much was insulation?
Although I grant that HDMI cables are all identical electrically, you do have to look at least a little at the build quality of the joints between the head and the rest of the cable. In the really cheap HDMI cables ($1-5) some of them are build to a really low standard and if you move/tilt/rotate your TV/Monitor you eventually wind up with a loose connection.
That all being said, there is never a justification for spending more than perhaps $15 or $20 at absolute most. Gold plating does absolutely nothing.
This has been known for quite some time. There's been many articles on this issue as well as, IIRC, there's been ones here on Slashdot too.
The only difference between cables that really matters is dispersion (frequency-dependent losses.) A difference of 1 dB/meter in loss between cables is going to make quite a difference at 30 meters. However, I wouldn't bet one way or the other on which brands have better or worse loss characteristics.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
"I'm sure most of us looking for an HDMI cable have been in a situation where a store clerk sidles up, offers to help and points to some of the most expensive HDMI cables"
And anybody who reads slashdot pays them absolutely no mind. Whatever the situation.
I once asked one of them how upscaling on dvd players work.
Answer: "it makes the resolution look higher".
Me: "I meant *how* does it makes the... sigh. never mind."
Free the Quark 3 from asymptotic confinement! Bring your charm! Don't get down! All colours and flavours welcome!
When you've been suckered into buying hundreds of dollars of cables for your system, and you either see/hear a difference or you were an idiot, you're going to notice a difference. It's good old fashioned self delusion.
Of course then it gets just awesomely ridiculous.
I keep asking myself how I can get some of that idiot money.
Duh. It's a digital signal, so either the cable works or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, take it back.
What a huge surprise.
HAND.
This is my favorite cable ever. Denon gets it - idiots want to give their money away, why not make it easy for them?
Well, as it turns out the claims are, for the vast majority of home theater users, utter rubbish.
And who is really surprised by this?
I once wanted a 6ft HDMI cable right away. I noted that they were available at a popular online cable store for $10, and set out to find one for $20 or so, considering that to be an acceptable mark up for the immediacy required. Couldn't find any for less than $30, most stores sold them for $50 or $60. They are either price fixing or just individually deciding to rip people off. Either way I just went home, paid $12 after shipping, and waited for them to show up.
--The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. --Tycho Brahe (Penny Arcade)
Especially as modern digital signals are transmitted differentially with embedded (implicit per kine) clock, as long as the signal arrives at all, it will be good. There is no degradation at all until the connection breaks down. Now, to transmit these signals, you need twisted-pair, which is very, very cheap as the same stuff has been used in network cables for a long time and is cheap to manufacture in the first place.
The only possible differences are mechanical stability of connector and cable. But unless you are in a rough environment, or unplug them very often, that does not matter either. In any case, as long as you stay within spec, cable quality does not matter at all, and that is a mathematical "not", not a "you won't be able to hear/see the slight degradation" as there is provably none.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
None of the benefits of analogue combined with none of the benefits of digital.
Compression: nope;
Error-checking/correction: nope;
Optical fiber: nope;
Text channel (e.g. for closed captioning): nope;
Content "protection": yep.
This even being on Slashdot kinda pisses me off. Do you think we're stupid?
It's one of those things so blatantly obvious that no one needs to do a study. A study concluding that cats like fish would have been more appropriate than this.
I used to think the same thing about Ethernet cables. it's all digital right? And yet I've seen speeds increase 10 fold when replacing old one. Cheap cables can have bad performance that can lie under your radar for all the packet loss. Even a cheap cable connecting to another computer not related to you can cause so many packet retrandmits that all your other computers are affected. thus it's not simply a matter of testing your own connection. when you test it, it might seem fine till that other computer starts using it's connection.
Of course with HDMI you are probably going to have a pretty good test: does the picture look crappy. So maybe this is less of an issue for things with screens.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Why don't HDMI cables have UL-like standards such that they can be treated like commodity items? And, perhaps I'm over-generalizing, why does our government/society encourage the consumption of imaginary assets (in this case, "better" quality HDMI cables)? It seems like "those in charge" think that the solution to our recession is to spend our way out of it, regardless of the efficacy of what we actually purchase (e.g., bottled water). It seems like "they" would rather have us work harder to maintain a neutral personal cash flow rather than to work the same amount, get ahead, and pay down our debt. Instead of manufacturing real goods, we manufacture imaginary goods.
A much better comparison was done months ago here: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-hdmi
It's a digital signal, so with the correct capture equipment, they were able to get a checksum of the image sent from different HDMI cables. And guess what, they were all identical.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I still have 19 monthly payments left on my HDMI cable!!!!!!!!!
Can we just get the bit error rate? Instead of putting the SNR on the x-axis we put the cable instead.
Uh, DUH! The cables carry digital information, as long as you get the signal to the TV in a manner that the TV can interpret, signal loss/distortion doesn't matter! Welcome to the digital age people, I'm amazed that they even went through the effort of trying to test this. The only reason why you would need a higher quality cable would be for longer distance runs. I mean, what self respecting nerd hasn't been telling everyone that they know to go to monoprice and pick up the cheapest hdmi cables they offer?
Becouse this one is a few years old: "HDMI brands really don't matter."
Brand doesn't matter.
Gauge, shielding, and construction can matter. What's needed depends on the environment, the characteristics of the two devices being connected, and on the distance between the two terminals. But the cost premium for addressing those factors is minor if it doesn't come with a brand attached.
And the idiots who buy that stuff. I love audio equipment reviews that start with "I'm an audiophile...". That's where I stop reading.
To prove to my friend that super-shielded uber-expensive HDMI cables are a load of shit, I took a cheap 5 foot HDMI cable, cut it in two, soldered between the two molded connectors 100 feet (x3 cables) of CAT 5 cable. After un-sleeving and splicing what seemed like two dozen conductors I had a mass of unshielded twisted pair with two molded HDMI connectors between them, I ran the 100 foot cable on top of AC power cables, speaker cable, coax, plugged it into my monitor and it worked perfectly. The only reason I'm not still using the cable is because one of the dozen or so solder points broken in the rats nest of splicing and I would get a crazy scrambled screen (or no image), after a few dozen technical taps the splice came apart and I didn't want to take another hour to put it back together - and lets face it, it was ugly. So there it is if anyone is curious, you can run HDMI over CAT 5 for 100 feet without enough attenuation or noise to break the signal.
And someone else mentioned that the length of the cable adds to the delay in the signal. Cable times are measured in nanoseconds, monitor refresh rates are measured in milliseconds. It would be like saying: I dunno if my RAM can handle the speed of my new hard drive. The length of the cable might add a few nanoseconds to your response time, but you cannot see the difference, you are not a robot. Long analog signal cables on the other hand can't run 3 feet without getting signal noise and causing ghosting and all sorts of other weird artifacts. All I can say is thank god all the analog A/V cables are a thing of the past. If I ever have to hear (OR SEE!) a 60hz hum again in my life it will be too soon.
i suspect the exspenisve cables are geared towards idiots and niggers.
How many niggers really have to money for those cables? The seller usually ends up eating the cost if they are using stolen credit cards, so it doesn't sound smart to be selling to them.
Technically theres no such thing as a digital signal; look at it on an oscilloscope and its a far cry from the impossible squarewave used to represent them.
The receiver has to make a choice when to switch a 0 to a 1, with long slopes, noise and ringing this can cause problems even if its a "digital" signal.
Equipment today is good enough that its "never" a problem, signals get reclocked and cleaned up, crc etc.
So no, you shouldnt buy expensive hdmi cables, but you shouldnt mistake the abstract digital concept for its real, messy electrical representation either.
I bought myself a $4 DVIHDMI cable on Ebay (to connect an external monitor to my laptop with a digital interface - since the colors are worse on VGA).
No audio, no encryption, so no possibility to screw up (compared to HDMIHDMI conections), right? The cable worked OK for two weeks, then stopped working as if it was unplugged. To get it working I had to disconnect it from the monitor (the DVI end) and reconnect it a couple of times until the laptop detected the exernal monitor.
Bought a regular HDMIHDMI cable with a DVIHDMI adaptor for a total of $15 in a local computer styore, works OK. The only issue is that the monitor displays a "check cable" message when the laptop is powered off instead of entering sleep mode.
By the way, regular polyethilene insulation with a metal connector is better than the cool-looking kevlar (?) shield with gold connectors. Gold usually turns out to be paint and comes off after a few reconnections and the "kevlar" shield peels off.
For short cables, 1 to 2 Meters in length I totally agree. In the case of longer runs though, say 4+ meters and above it is essential to have a very good quality cable between the source and the display. Save your money and go cheap on the short runs for the digital cables.
(i promise i'm not a shill)
monoprice.com
they do an awesome job of getting any type of cable i need, at an awesome price.
It's all about making margin. I used to work for a DJ supply company and the profit came from cables and other accessories. Where the electronic item had a small 10-20% markup, the profit margin on the various accessories ranged from 1000-2000+%. The trick was that the consumer would spend their time educating themselves on the cost of their main purchase, so that price was pretty much dictated. The salesperson-recommended accessories however, those were a different story!
It's okay though, my employee discount was actually 10% above cost, so my cable purchases felt like theft! :)
Known this for years. Thought everyone with an IQ greater than 5 already knew it as well.
Great surprise there!
Experts have determined that purchasing the most expensive chess set does not improve your ELO score. #noshitsherlock
HDMI does have some error checking. Each 8-bit byte is sent as 10 bits, to maintain DC balance. The receiving end can detect at least single bit errors. The reaction of most HDMI devices is error concealment, and the error counts are seldom if ever made visible to the user.
Some of the earliest CD players had visible error counters. This was discouraged in consumer devices by industry agreement.
If Joe Public ever learns this, Best Buy would be out of business within a year.
I have found the best places to get good working (1080p) cables on the cheap that actually work are PC builder shops PC/console and game shops. Go for the braided ones with gold plugs not the cheap plain black ones with silver plugs (I find they dont give me full HD even though they say they are 1.4 certified). I recently paid AUD$17 for a 5 meter braided (blue) HDMI cable and it works fine, made in china of course but who cares as long as it works and looks like it will last. Avoid retail electrical shops as their cheap cables are utter crap and their working cables are $60-100.
if you are referring to error codes causing degradation, what could possibly be intermittent? It either connects (works) or it doesnt.
In theory, uncorrectable errors caused by degradation of the modulated digital signal could cause a link to renegotiate at a slower data rate, which might mean dropping to 720p or 480p. Think back to dial-up: some phone lines could get 50 kbps; others only 30 kbps.
so long as 0 and 1 are different enough for a given situation - it doesn't matter HOW DIFFERENT they are. Making them MORE different does NOT improve signal quality.
I thought making the 0 and 1 more different meant the link could use higher-bitrate modulation, which would improve perceived signal quality: 1080p 3D vs. 1080p vs. 720p.
Here's a secret that isn't concealed very well... Almost all cable distributors get their cable and interconnects from one of a couple vendors. Belden is the primary supplier to all, including Monster Cable. They assemble the cable, interconnects, and then all the reseller does is slap sheaths on the ends that have their brand name on it. This is also why the same suit at Halberstadt's costs $500 more at Marshall Fields (or what is now Macy's)... because the suit comes from the same factory, but has a different label sewn into it depending on where it is sold.
The funniest experience I've heard relating to this phenomenon of rebranding: I have a friend with an M.S. in Engineering. He did R&D on ASICs for Honeywell as well as R&D for CBS Soundlabs, including but not limited to the development of the FMX quadrature. He was given a tour of the Wadia factory. Wadia, for those who don't know, is a manufacturer of, among other things, $3500 CD players. Granted, these CD players use marginally better (not worth a $3450 premium, however) Burr-Brown D/A converters (at a time when every CD player manufacturer uses one or another Burr-Brown DAC)... but the laser transport mechanism that they say is so special is manufactured by... wait for it.... PIONEER, and is the very same laser transport that goes into Pioneer's bottom end CD players.
A fool and his money are soon parted...
I found 2 differences:
1) The more expensive cables look cooler than the cheap ones
2) The more expensive cables are a little more durable, I've had some cheap cables fall apart / break off Mostly its the cheap cables that try to look expensive that are the worst kind, those that are so thick you need pipe bending tools to bend them. The thin molded ones work great.
This whole argument has rather been done to death hasn't it?
The sky is blue and bears sh*t in the woods.
Aside from the fact it extrapolated data from the results of 5 tests and then asserted its truth with the statement "we tested it here in the PCmag labs". The article itself was wordy. words rantogetherlikethis which speaks volumes for it being a pc related site. Im also reading the mobile version from my iphone which is even worse that they didnt take time to make sure it worked properly. On top of that i just started yawning when they started with the numbers....who cares? Just tell me what u found in a concise a manner as u can. If i wanna duplicate ur work provide a link or reference to a more detailed steps. Shut uuuuuup.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
I'm sure most of us looking for an HDMI cable have been in a situation where a store clerk sidles up, offers to help and points to some of the most expensive HDMI cables
Nope, I haven't been in that situation a single time. I saw how ridiculously expensive those cables are in the store, so I went online and found them at Monoprice. You can pick your color and exact length and it's shipped fast at a great price.
Honestly I can't see any difference between HDMI and the old 3-piece analog component cable, even for HD. HDMI is worth it only because it's easier to plug in. That, and my motherboard integrated graphics has HDMI out.
Penny - plain text accounting
And the HDMI technical specification actually works as intended?? STOP THE PRESSES
"Outdated business models" is code for "I don't like paying for things, but want them anyway"
Gold electroplating doesn't add a whole lot to the cost, although it's often used as an excuse to jack up the prices.
I'm an accountant in a company that makes wire harnesses so I'm more qualified than most to comment on this. Gold plated contacts typically cost 3-4X the more mundane alternatives in most cases. At retail the prices get so jacked up that you probably won't notice the difference but gold contacts are quite a bit more expensive at wholesale.
Oh, and for the VAST majority of applications gold contacts are a complete waste of money.
Unfortunately, if you want cables et al that are not complete junk, you often have no choice except for the "audiophile" stuff.
Bullshit. If you think that then you almost certainly don't understand the engineering involved. I do the accounting and some engineering at a wire harness manufacturer. The "audiophile" cables are always hugely overpriced and normally over engineered compared to what is actually needed.
Not everyone who buys that stuff is an idiot, some just want a solid cable that will last for 20 years and will not break during normal use.
No, just 99.9999% of them are idiots. I've got cables that are older than I am that continue to work just fine "during normal use" and aren't made of unobtanium and unicorn farts.
And I've heard that it's possible to make your own HDMI cable, just like you can make your own Ethernet cable, which would probably be even cheaper.
You can make almost any cable if you are willing to invest in the tooling. You won't save any money doing it however unless you do it for a living. Just buy your HDMI cables over the internet for reasonable amounts of $ and you'll be fine.
You can run HDMI over Cat-5 sometimes, depending on the resolution. The thing with HDMI is the bandwidth needed varies with the signal resolution. If you just want to do 1280x720@24Hz the bandwidth (in terms of digital bits) you need is very low and thus the cable bandwidth (in terms of analogue frequency) is also very low. If you want to do 1920x1080@120Hz it is much higher.
It also depends on how noisy your environment is. Your example with power cables is a bad one since that is too low frequency to matter to HDMI. However if you have noise in the 100s of MHz, that is the range of the signal over the cable and thus interference can happen if the run is too long, or if the shield is bad (or non existent as in your case).
So for consumers the easy guide to follow is just to check the cable's certification. Any cable worth buying will tell you if it is certified standard speed or high speed. Standard speed is a certification for 720p or 1080i, high speed is for 1080p. If you get a cable that is certified to the speed you need, you are good to go. All the cables from cheap places like Monoprice are.
Now the certifications are overkill, as is usually the case with this stuff. You'll find that you can usually get a longer "standard speed" cable and run 1080p over it no problem. However the reason for the overkill certifications is that it'll work in more or less any conditions. The farther you go out of the spec, the more likely a problem is.
Same deal with Ethernet. If you try it, you discover that you can indeed have cable runs over 100 meters, sometimes WAY over. Thing is, sometimes you'll have problems if you try. 100 meters is the "going to work almost no matter what" spec.
Thus "just follow the spec" is my advice for regular users. High speed HDMI cables are cheap as hell from Monoprice and you just won't have any trouble.
Not to shill or anything, but any discussion of HDMI (or cables in general) wouldn't be complete without someone mentioning monoprice.com:
Here's their page of HDMI cable pricing where a 50ft hdmi cable is less than $35.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Bullshit. Gold, silver, copper, and aluminum all have approximately the same extremely low electrical resistivity (high electrical conductivity) for all practical purposes. And when you are talking about plating, the distance through which the current has to travel makes the resistance of the plating material completely negligible. Gold plating is on the order of 1/5000 to 1/2000 mm (0.2 to 0.5 microns) thick.
Heck, mercury switches and contacts were used for a long time; less so now for environmental reasons. They work fine, even though mercury has 40 times the resistivity of gold, and the design calls for current to travel through a far greater path length in the mercury.
And nothing is "incorruptible," not even gold or platinum. Current arcing, even minute in degree, can burn gold plated contacts over time. Atoms from the substrate metal can migrate into the gold over time, changing its properties.
But surface condition IS of great importance for contacts, and it is for this reason that gold and platinum are frequently used for this purpose. They have superb corrosion resistance.
Electrical resistivity:
Silver 15.87 nm
Copper 16.78 nm
Gold 22.14 nm
Aluminum 28.2 nm
Nickel 69.3 nm
Platinum 105 nm
Tin 115 nm
50-50 tin-lead solder 156.7 nm
Mercury 958 nm
Note that platinum and tin are perfectly serviceable as platings on electrical items such as component leads. Their resistivity, which is far higher than gold, is nonetheless so slight as to be entirely negligible.
If you want nice over engineered cable, they are the place to go. They use Belden wire and do a top notch job terminating it. It is professional grade stuff.
So if for whatever reason your installation calls for some over engineered cable, they are the way to go. They do custom lengths and all that jazz too.
For regular stuff, go with Monoprice. I have been extremely satisfied with their stuff. It is well built and does what it says it does. Not super over engineered pro stuff, but then it is cheap as hell so it isn't like a replacement is a big deal (though I've not had to replace any Monoprice cables yet).
Do you really think that infinitesimal noise is going to flip a bit in a DIGITAL signal like HDMI?
I bought like 10 of them a year ago on monoprice for like $3 each. Hopefully I'll never need to buy one again.
Duh?
The only difference I've seen is in the adhesive used to hold the ends together. I've had a cable melt from the heat of my PS3 , so slightly bending the cable caused the end to fall apart.
I have over 40 feet long hdmi cable run at home with which I had problem of random pixels appearing in the projected image. At first I hesitated to even try different cables as I also thought different hdmi cables do not make any difference.
However, I tested 5 different brands of hdmi cables. The most expensive brand was the only one that worked without any random pixels. With the cheapest cable there was no picture produced at all.
I'm not saying that the most expensive is the best, but in my case it was the only one that produced an error-free picture.
So based on my experience I can't agree with "HDMI brands really don't matter."
Newer HDMI can carry audio...
The content protection? Well if your source is protected yea, but it shouldn't be if you're doing it right.
It's easier... 1 plug.
How many video cards have you seen with component video out?
So I consider HDMI superior to component video for practicality, but yes, you should by the absolute cheapest HDMI cable you can find that's the right length for your application. Gold connectors and such are silly as hell. As long as the connector is still conductive, the material it's made out of is irrelevant.
Thanks Slashdot, without this vitally informative article, none of us idiots would ever have known that a digital cable either works, or doesn't work, and there is no inbetween.
As long as the digital bits are getting to the other end of the cable unmolested, there should be no perceivable difference. And any cable that meets spec, when used with equipment that also meets spec, should get the bits there intact. That $3 cable from Monoprice will get the job done just as well as the $100 (or more!) high-end cable.
News? I thought this was just common sense.
Walmart - $10.
I needed an HDMI cable while visiting some family.
They went to Walmart for something else, but also brought back a cable. Gave me the cable.
$0.
I'm watching an HD TV show from last night (Smallville finale) using that cable from a WD TV Live HD right now. Lois is HOT!
So many stories have been posted about the false claims of expensive HDMI cables that this can hardly be considered news.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
Is if you have a Denon receiver with Denon Link, as I do, it notes in the manual you can just use any Cat-5 cable.
The whole reason they introduced this was whiny audiophiles that couldn't deal with a cheap cable degrading their precious bits :). Denon Link was designed to operate over regular network cable to give multi-channel digital audio back in the days before HDMI. However the audiophiles didn't like the "just buy a patch cord" idea so Denon decided they could make a bunch of money doing nothing, hence this cable.
use to sell those things when i worked at best buy. that cable you see there for $75+, well it really costs around $5. the thing is they push these because margin has been lost in other areas. a TV sale use to have a good profit for the store. however as newer flat screens came out the margins shrunk. now most TV's are being sold at or around cost, in some cases below. thus the push for cables, service and "service plans". however the gig was up from day one. the reason, internet and cell phones. people talk more, so word spreads. many are going with "store branding". they will have their own brand and it "compares" with the "high end" brand. they make less, but it is more realistic than the high priced version to the customer even if it the exact same cable. hey, you wanted capitalism...
Oh, and for the VAST majority of applications gold contacts are a complete waste of money.
Which is something we probably all thought was the case.
This was particularly brought home to me when I discovered that a lot of the Optical Audio cables I've seen recently have suddenly started having gold plated connectors.
I mean really, Gold Plating on an Optical cable, does anyone with any intelligence fall for these stupid tricks?
... that monster cable still exists.
Somebody, quote me some PT Barnum!
I think we all knew this.
Support SETI@home
That depends on how many niggers split the money from my bike they stole last week. Either a single nigger could purchase 40 of those cables, or 40 niggers could purchase one each.
seeing as how the nigger species is unable to act in a way that benefits their society at large (citation: the entire fucking continent of africa), my guess is that a single nigger somewhere can afford 40 of these cables.
Use a simple example of a digital medium, text IE a novel. For example if someone tried to sell you a copy of Camus' "The Stranger" and claimed that by using better paper and ink it turns from a plot-less, pointless mess of a book that makes many glad he got killed in a car wreck to a wonderful masterpiece of literature you'd think he was nuts. You'd say to yourself all that matters is the printing is good enough for me to make out the words. Any less isn't good enough and any more is a waste.(Using better paper isn't going to improve that horrible piece of trash.) The same is true with an HDMI signal. (Because both are digital. Once it's good enough to get the signal you can't get "more" signal by doing anything.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I have seen salesfolk tell MONSTER lies. Before studying CS in university, I went to college for 2 years and took an Electronics Engineering course (it was a 2 year course). Besides all the calculus and circuit theory, semiconductor band theory, digital curcuits, analogue circuits, etc., you also learn how to use various pieces of equipment like spectrum analysers, oscilloscopes, frequency counters, DMMs, waveform analysers, logic analysers, etc. Since its only wire within the HDMI cable, and there are only a few electrical characteristics of wire like impedence (which is a combination of resistance, inductance and capacitance), then anything else is smoke and mirrors (aka marketing). I bought an hdmi cable for a video player I bought for the folks last Christmas, and paid what I though was a fairly reasonable price of $9.95 for a 6 foot cable. Some might cry out "oh the horror", but, like I said, I happen to know better. It doesn't hurt either that the local TV news did a piece a few years ago with an electrical engineer, a wideband signal generator, and a spectrum analyser. Tested side by side were a MONSTERously expensive cable costing over $100, and a $15 dollar cable. Over a run of 20 feet, (less than the HDMI maximum of 49 feet or 15 meters), he found absolutely no difference between the two cables (other than cost). Both delivered perfect fidelity. They were identical, except one was MONSTERously expensive, and the other didn't have useless gold tips (hint: the gold plating wears off fast, and the conductor beyond the gold is 99.9999% of the conductor...sure is perty though). I've seen sales folk tell MONSTERous lies about how all is lost unless you spend megabucks (and since they are soaking you thousands on that ginormous TV, they may as well soak you like mad for a cable the manufacturer made for $3.
And why do you think it matters? The only data in the HDMI spec which need to be isochronous, jitter and delay controlled, etc is _ONE_ _WAY_. You need several _MILES_ to get jitter between the signals on the different wires worth mentioning. The two way signals which can be influenced by this and used for keying, recognition of capabilities, etc are low bandwidth and non-realtime.
The only thing that matters for one-way serial connections like DVI or HDMI is reflections from the connectors (and transmitting/receiving electronics) and noise (especially from crosstalk). For 15 feet the cable needs to be really sh*t for these to show up.
In fact, just open up a player or a computer with a HDMI in/out and look at the traces coming/going from/to the connectors. They sometimes go for up to 10cm unprotected, unscreened and in HIGH NOISE environment. Snapping a 100$ cable on top of that because it "does not deteriorate the signal" is not just stupid, it is totally bonkers.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
OK, I did spend 12 years without a TV of any sort until I got married, and we've only changed TV once since then. So it's clearly less important to me than the radio (worn out 3 since I got hitched). But I've still never (TTBOMK, it's not something you talk about) seen anyone who has got a HMDI interconnect, nor do I know any reason to get one.
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Shouldn't this be in the "No Fucking Shit Dept."?
(SLOW DOWN, COWBOY! Slashdot requires you to type like two old people hunting and pecking at a single keyboard with the occasional bout of incontinence and hip-breaking.)
The whole AV industry needs them commonly and past that length.
We simply add hdmi boosters at the end of the first 50 feet.
Check extron manuals for more details but we do need em , and bad.
Here the gauge of the cable comes in play.So is the outside jacket.
At 50 feet the cable itself comes to about a half inch in diameter and we
have the added problem of conduits. But simply put almost all connectors
are fragile because they were not meant to support the weight of all that cable
nor the force exerted on the small part.
ric
I managed to save someone from buying a "quality" cable. My friend has a PS3 and was going to buy an "official" HDMI cable for it, costing around 30€, but I said that 10€ cable works just as well. He knew that I know a lot about electronics and followed my advice. And as I expected, the cheap cable he bought works perfectly. It's always nice to help others with stuff like this, the only downside is that they usually don't pay me anything :(
At least if you get a reasonably modern TV. My TV, which is like 2 years old, supports MKV and MP4 files (and others) with H.264 video (and some others) and AC-3 audio (and again others).
Well guess what? I can't see that standard getting outdated anytime soon, can you? I suppose if you are talking the "scene" shit where the warez kiddies find some new "flavour of the month" they like for encoding, or just do a crap job. However when I want to encode something and play it back, it works great, and it's gonna be awhile before H.264 is outdated. Eventually we'll get something that is enough of an improvement to merit moving to a new format, but not for some time.
I think we'll see new resolutions (which will need a new set of course) before we seen any widespread adoption of a new format.
In terms of panel quality, well all that tells me is you've not done much looking or research. As a starting point, look up TN, PVA and IPS. Those are the three general different technologies for LCDs and they have some seriously different appearances. Of course within them there have been developments. Then if you are really interested, go see some displays, preferably side by side. You then maybe understand why a Dell ST2420L can cost $220 and a Dell U2410 can cost $600 and yet people will still buy the U2410 (the basic reason is the ST2420 is a cheap TN panel, the U2410 is a high quality H-IPS panel).
Even withing a technology, there are ranges and improvements. I have an old IPS panel at work that is nice and all, but has a fairly slow response and shows some ghosting, as well as having pretty poor contrast (maybe 300:1 measured). At home I have a newer very high end IPS panel that is very fast with no real visible ghosting, much better contrast (650:1 measured or so) and superb colour on account of the ability to be calibrated in hardware.
Same deal applies to TVs, it is just a little harder to find panel information. However you find a high end TV with a nice, modern IPS panel it'll look better than an older TV with a cheaper panel.
If it is worth it to you is a different matter, but it isn't like LCDs have sat static technology wise.
I was told my my nice 19 year old assistant sales person trying to sell me a £70 HDMI cable that this HDMI cable was better than most because it reduced signal noise which gave me a better picture. He also continued by saying that HDMI supported digital protocols that were similar to the Ethernet protocol found in PCs...
"Ah," I said "that's right I believe"... I told him my Ethernet cable attached to my computer is "cheap as chips" using basic copper with some shielding, oh and the HDMI like Ethernet has built in error connection so fancy hardware shouldn't be needed. Thus even a very cheap cable should provide sufficient data throughput and interference protection because the methods behind HDMI certification was the prevailing benefit, not the Gold on the cable. "Yes??? "
His response was ummmmm errrrrrr.. I guess that's your opinion.
"No that's not opinion, that's fact!" I said as I walked away. Big smile on my face.
Fuck you asshole, I am sick of your racist shit. Time you stopped overcompensating for your 1" dick and face reality
A bunch of audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between monster brand and coathangers
The new right fascists are bilingual. They speak English and Bullshit.
Did anyone here commenting on this read the article? Their HDMI Basics part is total crap.
If they actually knew what they were talking about they would know that HDMI is an uncompressed video format with no error correction. 1) it's impossible for it to get blocky because those are artifacts of frame-based video compression techniques like the MPEG family. 2) The lack of error correction means that there's never an issue with whether or not there's enough data to put together a picture. Every since bit in the picture portion of the signal could be wrong and it would still show the resultant image. 3) Because of the lack of error correction, it is, in fact, entirely possible for the video signal to degrade. Specifically, this happens when some of the individual bits get misread and the result is that particular pixels are suddenly too light or too dark for one or more of their component colors. This is generally known as "sparkles" because it's generally marked by having random pixels which are markedly bright blue, red, or green for a single frame (due to a high-order bit being flipped).
I'm so happy you just said it "adeelarshad82" - and great link to Will's article. I have been "duped" into buying this crap everytime I purchased a "TV" or a "Console, like xbox, ps3, whatever" - they would always say, you need these cables to get the best picture - at yet a 3-500% markup. Just RIDICULOUS! HA! Well
The Nerd Blurb - If a Nerd Doesn't Know, No One Knows!
I remember going through the same thing with USB and USB 2.0. I used a USB cables for $5 and got the same result as an expensive USB 2.0 cable. Bottom line is, you can get a good quality HDMI cable for 10 bucks at big lots! If you don't believe me then try it and compare, then return the one you don't want :)