The HD Guruâ„¢ has been warning readers since November 2006 about false claims made regarding the superior HDTV performance of expensive name brand HDMI cables when compared to a cheap ones. Canada’s public television network, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) has extensively tested a brand name, very expensive HDMI cable against less costly ones and confirmed the HD Guru’s advice. It found that a generic $6.00 (plus shipping) HDMI cable obtained from an internet retailer provided exactly the same high definition performance as the name brand cable costing $216!

In a report by CBC’s Erica Johnson, three HDMI cables were rounded up for testing and supplied to Maxine Caron, a CBC production engineer. The group consisted of a well know brand name cable ($216 Canadian), Best Buy’s house brand (Rocketfish $110 Canadian) and a the generic 15 ft. HDMI cable obtained via the internet for $6 plus $6 shipping (BTW Canadian dollars are currently exchanging around 1:1 with the US dollar).

Caron compared his source HDTV test signals to the output of each HDMI cable being tested at CBC’s test facility. The findings, all three HDMI cables tested reproduced every single pixel of the HDTV source. Caron commented that all three cables reproduced exactly the same image, including color quality, sharpness and black level. There was no performance advantage using the higher priced HDMI cables!

There may be differences in construction quality of the most expensive HDMI cables as compared to the cheapest, and perhaps if you plan to disconnect and reconnect the same cable dozens or hundreds of times, expensive cables will hold up better. However, the HD Guruâ„¢ has been using a number of inexpensive HDMI cables including ones made by Philips (about $20 at amazon.com) that have been disconnected and reconnected to different sources and displays dozens of times. To date, there has been no product failure.

One final note, buying a cable capable of passing a wider bandwidth (also referred to as speed or expressed as Gbps) than required, provides no image improvement.

You can see the CBC report at

http://www.cbc.ca/mrl3/8752/marketplace/packing_the_deal.wmv

Copyright ©2008 Gary Merson/HD Guru™. All rights reserved. The content and photos within may not be distributed electronically or copied mechanically without specific written permission.