Which HDMI Cables?

[directhex]

Like i said, from having checked them both i noticed a better picture on the miore expensive lead. As did everyone else i asked to check as well without telling them which lead was which.

I also noticed a big improvement in my sound when i changed them leads as well.

neon

then your kit is duff. it's not physically possible for a digital picture to look better due to the cable. it cannot look sharper, because the sharpness is defined by the video data stream. it cannot have better colors, as the colors are defined by the video data stream. it cannot sound better, as the audio quality is defined by the audio data stream. failures in any of the streams have significant noticeable effects - macroblocking and skipping.

[beanbandit]

see that HDMI logo? that means "this is an HDMI cable". which means it meets certain minimum data transmission requirements.

HDMI signals are computer data. there is no physical way for a picture to be better with one cable than another, unless one of the cables is broken - in which case the effect will be MPEG macroblocking or sound jumping

I've played around with hundreds of cables & so many different types of connections over the last 20+ years in the electronics industry. I'd rather pay more for a better quality cable & a better quality connector. It doesn't matter on the 1's and 0's when you've bought a cheap crappy interlink when the solder starts breaking, wrong type of solder used, insulation is so thin that it starts shorting etc. Buying quality will give me piece of mind.

So the HDMI logo means everything then? Then i suggest that next time they design a connection that they use a locking system, and that overall design of the connector is looked at. Logo's don't mean squat at times!

[neonplanet40]

Sure becuase it has a hdmi logo doesnt mean it wont interfer with other cables when they are all bundled close together? Cheap cables come with crappy insulation and connectos.

I noticed 'noise' from the cheap speaker and hdmi leads in which i think that all the cables which are bundled closely together (cable management) interferred with each other due to inadequate sheilding. this had an effect on overall sound and picture.

Maybe thats not what was happening but either way the expensive ones look and sound better. This is from my own expierience. And my kit isnt duff or it just would not work at all regardless of cable.

[directhex]

Sure becuase it has a hdmi logo doesnt mean it wont interfer with other cables when they are all bundled close together? Cheap cables come with crappy insulation and connectos.

I noticed 'noise' from the cheap speaker and hdmi leads in which i think that all the cables which are bundled closely together (cable management) interferred with each other due to inadequate sheilding. this had an effect on overall sound and picture.

Maybe thats not what was happening but either way the expensive ones look and sound better. This is from my own expierience. And my kit isnt duff or it just would not work at all regardless of cable.

do you use shielded, braided cat6 cable to get online?

[Howard]

QED QUNEX HDMI-P Cable 1m - FutureShop.co.uk

i got three of these leads for my kit and can highly reccommend them. I know people say you notice no difference but i can tell you that you do.

When i got my toshiba hd-e1 hd-dvd player it can with a hdmi lead. When comparing it to the new QED lead i can tell you that the picture is a lot crisper.

Rubbish. It's the placebo effect. Sorry. Digital is digital. Unless the cable is faulty the picture will be the same. The digital photos on your hard drive don't get "crisper" when you use a better SATA cable.

[TheAnimus]

QED QUNEX HDMI-P Cable 1m - FutureShop.co.uk

i got three of these leads for my kit and can highly reccommend them. I know people say you notice no difference but i can tell you that you do.

When i got my toshiba hd-e1 hd-dvd player it can with a hdmi lead. When comparing it to the new QED lead i can tell you that the picture is a lot crisper.

This is from my own expierience. My advice is go to a audio visual shop and ask for a demonstration and you will see for yourself.

The best test is a fast moving action seen on blu-ray at 1080p. You will notice a huge difference between the two (1 being a quality lead and the other being a cheap one)

No sir, you won't.

For a start of the digital signal in these leads is so laughably small 5V so call it around 5mA at 5V, or 0.025W. (excuse me if this GCSE science is getting complicated, and the only way to counter it is "it sounds and looks better to me").

So lets look at the resistance of a 3m cable shall we. Well what would you know, my fluke meter, a £1200 oscilloscope can't tell its connected to it, rather than just its probes, thats a very low resistance cable. Lets look at the voltage drop, again, indeterminable (compared to the drop of the load (the reciver)). So we can assume there is practically 0 drop. Looks like my £5 cables are doing the job just fine, on my 1080p tv watching fast moving action films. (which FYI would make in fact no difference. What would make a more of a problem is a constantly changing line moving image, this would generate the most "noisey" digital patterns, an explosion, will pass through the possibilities far faster than that.

All in all, a fool and his money are soon parted. Save your money on DIGITAL interconnect leads, and buy better kit at either end. Enless your really rich, in which case shouldn't you be having sex with many pretty ladies on a pile of money, whilst dropping things out of the airship onto the prolites below.

[bigblue]

I'm all for "premium" analogue cables, especially audio interconnects (and have had a multi-page debate about it here with Rave, sure I'm not alone !) but for digital... um, no.

Why spend £1k on a great screen, but be too cheap to spend anything more than £5 to connect to it?

It's nothing to do with being "cheap", more to do with common sense.

Exactly true. My entire kit cost me well over £3000

Maybe so, but there's folk with systems costing many times that who are perfectly happy with cheapo leads. I've seen a demo on a front projection set-up, with a 30k projector fed from fantastic sources, and changing the lead from a £5 ebay shot to a £100 branded cable made precisely no difference.

What bothers me, particularly with the mags (or a certain one in particular) is that they list analogue type image problems as a symptom of cheaper digital cables. Nonsense.

Many times on many different forums I've seen people challenged to post screenshots to prove the difference, and it's never happened.

How many photographers use "premium" cables to connect their SLR's or printers ? I was at a studio a few weeks back, with the most phenomenal image processing and printing facilities I've ever seen, and it's all connected up using bog standard leads, and the card reader on one of the connected Macs was a £5 sandisk. Surely somewhere like that would have better cables if there was any difference ?

[MSIC]

2m cables, £4.69 inc VAT on Today Only.

As good as any others

[gtech]

The whole HDMI cable quality debate is a load of rubbish,

There is not a shred, not one shred, of scientific evidence that shows that HDMI cable quality can improve or degrade picture or sound quality. With HDMI, if you get the picture and sound, then you will be seeing it exactly as you would on a £500 cable. You either see the picture or you don't, if you see it you get it as it should be.

The data is digital, 00110101 is 00110101 and nothing else will do. Ah, you say, surely interference could change this to 00110100 couldn't it? Well, yes. But here's the catch, there is something called a checksum sent along with the data stream which lets the receiving device (the TV) check the integrity of the data it has receivied. If it is changed, by even a single bit, then it is detected and gets rejected. This happens in all things digital.

Put it this way. If you upgraded the cable betweeen your ADSL router and the telephone, would web pages look any clearer? No, because the data is digital. If you download a picture as part of an email attachment on a slow or unreliable Internet connection (a mobile phone for example), does it look any different to how it would if you had downloaded it on a corporate connection that uses dark fibre optic? Of course not. You either get the attachment or you don't.

As for 1.3, this (as you all undoutedly know) brings a number of new features like deep colour that need a higher data rate. Some cables claim to be capable, others don't. But once again, if you have a 1.3 capable source and TV, and you are getting a picture, you are (subject to settings) getting the 1.3. You either get it or you don't.

The only, absolute only thing that an expensive HDMI cable may (may) be able to do is show a picture over a long or difficult run that a cheap cable couldn't, or provide a higher standard (1080p instead of 1080i for example) but once again, it's the difference between seeing a picture (or hearing sound) and not, it CANNOT affect the picture.

[Zak33]

I have a gold plated USB cable, that I got from PC World for £25. I use it for various things.

It makes my printer print sharper, clearer images.
I use it to transfer files from my PC to a pen drive and back again, as it makes the colours of the spread sheets deeper and more vibrant.

And best of all, it makes the tunes on my MP3 player transfer with a wamer, and more resonant tone.

not

[DR]

Okay so I bought the £5.49 ones however - there is an interesting thing to note - if I get sparkles I will get ones which are better shielded - but as everyone said it is digital.

The Sparkles issue CAN exist on cheap cables/connectors - however 99% of the time you won't see it...

[Howard]

I bought cheap ones with my HDDVD player (and use them on my V+ box too) running through a sea of other mains/signal cables and the signal is flawless

[Lowe]

How many photographers use "premium" cables to connect their SLR's or printers ? I was at a studio a few weeks back, with the most phenomenal image processing and printing facilities I've ever seen, and it's all connected up using bog standard leads, and the card reader on one of the connected Macs was a £5 sandisk. Surely somewhere like that would have better cables if there was any difference ?

Same goes for recording studios as well - if you saw the leads used for analogue sources in some studios you'd cringe!

[directhex]

won't anyone buy my pro shielded cat6 with gold connectors? £50 a metre to you fine folks

[finlay666]

Quality for analogue yes...digital not really much difference

I would go for the quality of the connector over the name tbh, a couple of people have said that they can see a difference but I do think it's a placebo effect

[MSIC]

Ok, now i am worried. I completely and honestly think that from a theoretical viewpoint, the 'all HDMI cables are the same' makes sense. I buy it.
But there's still a small part of me that thinks 'is there some factor, some variable that i havent considered that may still affect the digital transmission at some point?
So then i go and buy "What Hi-Fi Sound & Vision" today, only to find a whole page on different (and very expensive) HDMI cables and how some are better at delivering colours, sound etc than others !!!

Now, i understand the theory. Digital is digital. 1 is 1, 0 is 0. But have i missed something? Or are even the experts fooled by placebo?