Buyer Beware: Misleading HDMI Cable Labels

So what is the new a/v cable coming out to succeed HDMI & Displayport?

Some variety of standard CAT5E/CAT6 cable, right? :rolleyes:
 
Kangg said:
When I bought my TV and Blue Ray player this past Winter at Best Buy .....

The sales guy that helped me tried to sell me an HDMI cable Made by Monster Cable and was going on and on about how much better it was than all the others, etc.. etc ...

I looked him dead in the eye and told him straight out that "you guys are ripping people off. Selling those cables to people that don't know any better is a sham. That 60 dollar Monster cable is no different than the one I bought at Monoprice.com for less than 9 bucks shipped. " He was pretty speechless after that lol.
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I think this is true, but I bought my PC HDMI cable because I believe that brass plating increases signal quality.
 
Bootleg Usher said:
So does this mean that HDMI 1.2, 1.3a, 1.4 doesn't mean anything or am I misunderstanding something?
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At the present time, no video card or monitor implements greater than 1920x1080 at 60Hz through HDMI, so the capability of the cable beyond 1.2 is totally irrelevant to PC users.

I wanted to say TV as well, but I think there are some 3D TVs out and am uncertain about what they can do through HDMI. I am even less certain about the state of 3D Blu-Ray players (whether they even exist on the market yet).
 
Bootleg Usher said:
So does this mean that HDMI 1.2, 1.3a, 1.4 doesn't mean anything or am I misunderstanding something?
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Yes the specs mean that different features are available for different HDMI spec's 1.3a added Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio for instance. Whats misleading is that you don't need a 100.00 6ft cable to get it. A cheap cable rated to the spec that your device requires will work just fine.
 
I laugh so much, well i probably shouldn't cas there are people that get scammed by this... I needed another hdmi cable a while back, but the wholesaler i go through couldn't pick the order until the next day, i wanted the cable that day so i went across the road from my workplace to Harvey Norman (a big electrical goods retailer in australia) to quickly check the prices of hdmi cables and if it was like 5-10 dollars difference then i'd say fuck it, thats quite a bit more expensive but i really do want it today... so walked into the store and asked the sales person where the hdmi cables and there they were ranging in price from about $50 to $200... I went "seriously, this is as cheap as they get?", he's like "oh i can check the system and see if there is anything cheaper".. i'm like "nah mate, forget that for what i'd be paying for this 2m cable i could get 10x 3m cables tomorrow"... so i waited till the next day for the wholesaler and paid my $6 for my 3m hdmi cable..

The cable scams have gone on long before hdmi, but at least at one point there used to be 'some' validity to it... when dealing with analogue sound or video (especially in a studio capacity) the quality of your cables does make a difference.. but how do you get through to people "it's fucking digital, either it works or it don't, there's no poor quality or high quality, they're just 1's and 0's traveling over wires, if they don't make it to the other end nothing happens, if they make it to the other end the video/audio is perfect, no middle ground"..

I have 5 hdmi cables running from various computers to various screen all of them cost $6 and all of them are PERFECT.. I had 1 faulty cable that would sometimes work and sometimes not because our rabbit took a little nibble on it and severed a wire in it and when it worked it was perfect and when it didn't it just didn't display anything...
 
nutzo said:
I know people are trying to make a point, but you would never be able to run an HDMI signal over a wire coat hanger, to much crosstalk and interference.

Try running GB ethernet over 200 feet of cat 3 and it likely will not work. But 200 feet of cat 5 probably will, and 330 feet of cat 6 would be no problem.

The main point, epecially with digital signals, is that as long as the cable meets the specs, it will work. A cheap $10 cable from monoprice is a good as a $100 cable from BestBuy if they both meet the spec.

Only difference might be in the quality of the conectors, but unless you plan on plugging & unplugging the cable several times a week, it shouldn't make much difference.
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Just to add to this. When we moved into a new neighborhood 6 years ago we were the first house to elect for the CAT5 wiring. The electrician wired it like a phone line (in fact I even got shocked while rewiring because he wired in the 50V from the phone line to one of the CAT5's). Anyways I got to looking online how CAT5 was wired, the electrician only ran one physical CAT5 to each wall receptical and each wall recepitcal had 2 network jacks.

So I got rid of the twisted pair setup and split the 8 wires into 2 seperate 4 wire runs. This allowed me to run 2 network jacks off one CAT5 wire. Since this is a 2 story house, the wires are probably close to 50 foot runs each.

When I went online before hand to ask if this was ok, everyone said no, it broke spec and it wouldn't work. I tried it anyways. 6 years later and I still max out Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) connections in my house. That was the only downside was that I gave up compatibility with 1000Mbps Gigabit by doing that method of splitting the wires.

Point is, digital is resilant. 2-3 feet is nothing in the grand scheme of things. Even 50 feet in something like a household enviornment is nothing.
 
Studios and content producers want the HDCP copy protection. Screw the customer. This is also one of the main reasons why there are so many problems when you use a HDMI switcher or a receiver with a HDMI switcher. There's also too much money in customers having to re-buy cables so manufacturers and retail stores love it. Look at the shit that's come out in the last few years. Now there's going to be a a slew of new HDMI cables coming out. Have a 3d TV? Great, you need to buy a HDMI 1.4 cable because your other cables wont work.

Lets hope a real consumer friendly connector comes out and gets widespread adoption.
 
WillC310 said:
Now there's going to be a a slew of new HDMI cables coming out. Have a 3d TV? Great, you need to buy a HDMI 1.4 cable because your other cables wont work.

Lets hope a real consumer friendly connector comes out and gets widespread adoption.
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Whoever is foolish enough to buy a 3D TV deserves to be ripped off.
 
Audio and Video over one single cable is kick ass though. Component was rediculous, DVI and Optical/COAX was better, but HDMI is great.
 
anthrex said:
It's amazing how much people buy into this marketing. Talking to some people I know who work at Best Buy I found that they whole heartedly and almost rabidly defend these cables and the so called differences. Poor uninformed consumers need to read up before they actually buy anything.
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Just more crap for the stupid to purchase and defend. But hey, bigger is better right...:rolleyes:
 
I have 6 HDMI cables in my setup and paid less than 50 for all 6 total, they areall hi speed rated and in the 2 years I've been using them not asingle issue. Gotta love Amazon for stuff like cables.
 
unfortunateson said:
So what is the new a/v cable coming out to succeed HDMI & Displayport?

Some variety of standard CAT5E/CAT6 cable, right? :rolleyes:
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Actually HDBaseT is not so much a successor to HDMI but more of an in addition to HDMI. Read this Article here by Electronic Home. And here is a little more in depth one at CE Pro. The way I look at it HDBaseT is just an easier way to run HDMI over a long distance for cheaper and at the same time do more with that run. HDMI will more than likely be around for a while since the industry has poured so much time into it, even if there are problems with it.
 
westrock2000 said:
So I got rid of the twisted pair setup and split the 8 wires into 2 seperate 4 wire runs. This allowed me to run 2 network jacks off one CAT5 wire. Since this is a 2 story house, the wires are probably close to 50 foot runs each.

When I went online before hand to ask if this was ok, everyone said no, it broke spec and it wouldn't work. I tried it anyways. 6 years later and I still max out Fast Ethernet (100Mbps) connections in my house. That was the only downside was that I gave up compatibility with 1000Mbps Gigabit by doing that method of splitting the wires..
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I've never had a problem splitting the pairs for (2) 100mb connection. The other option is to just buy a cheap 5 port switch to allow 4 systems over a single wall plug.

Had a problem years ago, where a major aerospace customer was compling about slowness and general network problems, of cource blaiming the systems we sold them. After verifying the PC's where ok, I connected my cable scanner to check their line, and the length was over 600 feet!
I told them that I was suprised it worked at all, since the spec was 330, and we could not support anything over the spec. Got in a big arguement with thier IT people, who said in thier test it worked up to 650 feet. Of course they tested with a big roll of cable in thier lab, not strung through the ceiling where it can pick up noise & other interference.
 
Here's a great article about whats wrong with the HDMI standard. (And this comes from one of the best cable shops around that makes money selling these things)

http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/whats-the-matter-with-hdmi.htm
In June 2005, the HDMI organization announced the HDMI 1.3 spec. Among other things, the 1.3 spec offers new color depths which require more bits per pixel. The HDMI press release states:

"HDMI 1.3 increases its single-link bandwidth from 165MHz (4.95 gigabits per second) to 340 MHz (10.2 Gbps) to support the demands of future high definition display devices, such as higher resolutions, Deep Color and high frame rates."

So, what did they do to enable the HDMI cable to convey this massive increase in bitrate? If your guess is "nothing whatsoever," you're right. The HDMI cable is still the same four shielded 100-ohm twisted pairs, still subject to the same technical and manufacturing limitations. And don't draw any consolation from those modest "bandwidth" requirements, stated in Megahertz; those numbers are the frequencies of the clock pulses, which run at 1/10 the rate of the data pairs, and why the HDMI people chose to call those the "bandwidth" requirements of the cable is anyone's guess. The only good news here is that the bitrates quoted are the summed bitrates of the three color channels -- so a twisted pair's potential bandwidth requirement has gone up "only" to 3.4 Gbps rather than 10.2.
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Along with a bunch of others who have said so: not all cables are the same. That being said so long as they meet the spec, there is no good reason why one should be $10 and others $100.
As far as I understand it, the cable specification for HDMI has not changed since the start, so your cheap cables should work just as good as the expensive ones.
When it comes to cat cables, and the various grades, there have been changes to the signal tolerances to the spec varying the amount of crosstalk, attenuation, degradation, etc.. That doesn't mean that you can't use a cat 2 cable instead of a cat 5 cable, in most day to day home setups that will work just fine, however the specification for cat 2 was not designed for 200ft runs at 1gpbs speeds while cat 6 was. Even so, the price differential between cat 2 and cat 6 isn't significant.

So just remember cable quality does matter! But it has very little reflection on what people will charge for it.
 
evilsofa said:
At the present time, no video card or monitor implements greater than 1920x1080 at 60Hz through HDMI, so the capability of the cable beyond 1.2 is totally irrelevant to PC users.
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Uh, higher resolution HDMI monitors do exist. I have a 1920x1200 monitor sitting next to me right now that's using an HDMI connection.
 
Unknown-One said:
Uh, higher resolution HDMI monitors do exist. I have a 1920x1200 monitor sitting next to me right now that's using an HDMI connection.
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Oops, 1920x1200 intead of 1920x1080. That's as far as they go, though. The Dell U2711, for example, is not able to do 2560x1440 at 60Hz on HDMI.
 
evilsofa said:
You mean like Pirahna 3D?
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hence the "some" and "well made" :-P

Avatar and Up exceeded expectation thus far. Clash of the Titans was ok. Perhaps we'll see some more good shows with 3D in mind as soon as they get tired of making regular movies into 3D.
 
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