The age old HDMI quality myth...

Vanquish-Storm

Vanquish-Storm

Vanquish-Storm

Soldato
Joined
22 Apr 2009
Posts
3,772
Location
North-West
http://news.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/hi/technology/newsid_10050000/newsid_10056500/10056547.stm

how can big companies justify selling something for £60+ when smaller companies can sell practically the same thing for a lot less?

im presuming also the bigger companies buy these in cheaper themselves and make more margin on the items. It isnt just HDMI cables too its all kinds of cables for example laptop power cables.

£2.99 HDMI cables for me from now on :P
 
I compared my 10M generic cable which cost £14.99 delivered against a friends 5M £90 cable he picked up with his projector.

We did a few tests without telling each other what cable we'd selected. Almost 50/50 results over the handful of test done.
 
I'm no expert at all, only going on my own personal experience, however:

A cable going from A to B and costing £35 in my mind would do no difference to a cable costing £2.99.

Having said that, when a £2.99 cable goes round the back of a stereo, or dangled behind a unit that has PSUs at the bottom of it, or other devices that may causes interferance of the signal going through the cable then THAT'S when I notice the difference between cables.
 
~J~ said:
Having said that, when a £2.99 cable goes round the back of a stereo, or dangled behind a unit that has PSUs at the bottom of it, or other devices that may causes interferance of the signal going through the cable then THAT'S when I notice the difference between cables.
Click to expand...

I've only every experienced that with analogue cables.
 
^^^^^ Spot on.

I too, was confused about HDMi quality a few months back. Talked to a very knowledgable chappy, and am now less confused.
It galls me when Vomit can sell '2m Blu-ray HDMI' cables at £65.99.
I bought a 1m cable from a supermarket for £1, although not tested it yet.
But i have 2 x £4 2m cables in use and they are absolutely fine. They actually have swivvel connectors for those awkward positions as well which is fantastic...especially for the price.

The punchline that bloke said was "Its digital, you either get audio and video or you don't."

I was happy with that summisation.
 
HDMI cable quality only becomes important when you're trying to do 15 or 20 meters. But "normal" lengths... it doesn't matter.

HDMI uses the same digital protocol as DVI which is called TMDS.

Here is a quote from Wikipedia:

"The transmitter incorporates an advanced coding algorithm which has reduced electromagnetic interference over copper cables and enables robust clock recovery at the receiver to achieve high skew tolerance for driving longer cable lengths as well as shorter low cost cables."

Spend more a few quid on a short HDMI cable and you're a mug.
 
Jeez! This topic should come with similar warnings to the 9/11 conspiracy threads. It's shocking the amount of times it comes up in the Home Audio / Cinema forum.

It's simple. A digital cable sends a 1 or an 0. That's it. If you want to spend £90 on a cable to do that, you need to have a block of wood with rusty nails hammered up your backside.

The ONLY things you might want to consider to justify a cost is the quality of the connectors at either end and how sung fitting they are in the HDMI port or cabling over distance, but IME even that is not an issue.
 
I heard this for the first time when I got my first HDMI-capable device (a V+ Box from Virgin) - the engineer was a rather pleasant fellow and he told me a fair bit about HDMI - and he then sold me two HDMI cables for a fiver - ever since I've just got the cheapest ones I can and I have never noticed any reduced quality - and I'm fairly picky :D
 
I got a couple from EBay (£4 total) that seemed to do the job nicely with my BT vision and Blu Ray player (720p and 1080p respectively) but they would not output 1080p when used with my PS3 (this is on the same TV)

Is the PS3 fussy at all about cables? I ended up getting an official PS3 one for 7.99 (not bad) which does the job nicely.
 
"As you connect more and more items together, say an HD box and games console, or multi channel amplifier, you will need better and better quality cables to maintain the quality of the signal.

"£120 cable for your first purchase? No. But certainly don't try to get away with a £1.99 cable"
Click to expand...

Im no digital expert, but how can you get degradation from a digital signal?
 
Last edited:
Annoys me that places like Currys force cables like this on customers, saying that their 90quid cable is superiour to a 99p one you can get off Amazon.
 
icehot said:
Annoys me that places like Currys force cables like this on customers, saying that their 90quid cable is superiour to a 99p one you can get off Amazon.
Click to expand...

that was my main aim of the thread, although i failed on pointing it out properly.

I think its good to see the BBC pointing the finger out at the purple shirt brigade for the rip off merchants that they are. The staff might as well wear a mask and hold a gun to you at the till as some people with limited knowledge still fall for their cheap tricks. I only blamed the staff partly on this as they are trained to drain as much money out of the customers.
 
Could not find a 5m HDMI cable in the stores for less than £80 no matter what.

Came home and ordered one for 5.99, works perfectly.

Chris' advice is to budget around 10% of a system's price for HDMI cables.
Click to expand...

Yeah, right, I'm not spending 300 pounds on HDMI cables :S
 
Last edited:
Chris Jenkins, tech labs manager for Future Publishing group, behind Home Cinema Choice, advice is to budget around 10% of a system's price for HDMI cables.
Click to expand...

So if you spend £1500 on a t.v and £300 on a playstation we should spend £180 on a hdmi cable ? i suppose he has links in his magazines showing us where to buy these from :p
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom