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.
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HDMI is a scam altogether. Forget about the price differences in the stupid cable itself. The quality of HDMI is inferior to your regular A/V cable connections. If you have a digital TV and a DVD player with HDMI connections, you can A/B a film and clearly see that HDMI squeezes the audio and blanches the color.
Ridiculous
HD Guru
HDMIGuy, I’m sorry but any electrical engineer would be more than happy to explain to you that your theories are nonsense. Yes longer runs can cause problems but they do not halve the bandwidth. There’s no such thing as a ‘faster’ cable, only a bigger pipeline (bandwidth). I hope nobody takes your counter-advice too seriously.
Folks, I sold for a higher quality electronics retailer. Was very suspicious about rip off cable prices & instinctively new better. After thorough investigation & testing with HD cable TV & Blue Ray player on multiple HDMI wires using a real HD movie projector where the pixels are greatly enlarged to show detail I found: There really is no difference All HDMI wires worked well $6 each to
$250. It was disgusting. I was constantly brainwashed by my employers/managers/sales reps etc. to sell expensive cables & worthless warrantees! Not only are expensive “premium hdmi” wires a scam but so are those warrantees they sell.
Many folks are routinely turned away or ignored who request service. The retailer blames the service company, the service company blames the factory repair service personnel & they blame the retailer. Etc. Bottom line endless runaround & unreturned messages to management. I was so disgusted at this routine I quit to go into an honest profession. “Don’t be a sucker.” Failure rates of good TV’s are published in Consumer Reports website under Repair & Reliability Ratings.
Best Brands ==> Lowest failure rates like 2% no
warrantee needed ever!
As a manager of a higher end retail store i can demystify this thred for everyone. There is a big difference in the HDMI cables on the market, from $6 to $300. We test every tv that comes out with flat panel display software, same blu-ray for each tv. It has motion clips, color clips, and resolution clips, it is very good software. With a cheap HDMI cable you can see trails in most images where as with the better cables you cannot see these. This is due to the mbs transfer rate of these cables. to put it mildly some cables are faster than others, its like bandwith. So for things like cable or sat., who only broadcast images in compressed 1080I at best a cheap cable will produce a very similar image as a expensive cable. But when blu-ray (not all but most) comes into play its a new ball game. each time you add a gadget into the equation you double amount of data trying to be pushed though (and each time you double the length of the cable you cut the amount of data than can be transfered in half) the cable, ie X.V color, deep color, 1080p, etc…, things only blu-ray offers.
So bottom line, if you want to be cheap and feed your 2k+ tv with a 6 dollar hdmi go for it, but only on cable, with blu-ray please invest the extra money on the cable or just dont buy the player
HDMI cable are one of the most ripoff scam there is, inspiretech sell a very good hdmi cable for around 5 bucks
http://www.inspiretech.com/c-31-hdmi-cables.aspx
I was in Circuit City the other day and saw a $199 6ft. HDMI cable – I was AMAZED. Talk about marketing.. The poor floor sales people have no idea either, especially after their brainwashing sessions from the cable manfacturer marketing drones. It’s really sad. Oh, and the $500 digital patch cable I’ve seen before takes the cake.. the performance of a sub – $1 RCA cable for… $500!
Here’s a very informative site on the topic:
http://www.bluejeanscable.com/articles/how-long-can-hdmi-run.htm
From everything I’ve been able to find there is no differance in performance between high and low cost cables in normal length runs.
If you use your hdmi-cables to deliver e.g. dvd-video, there aren’t differencies. But when you use higher (1.3) standards, blu-ray+truHD, you can’t get decent result with cheap wires. It’s not true that digital signal either goes through perfect, or not at all. Cheap wires cannot carry as much bandwidth in long runs (10 meters). I personally had problems with the picture, but it cleared out after changing the cable.
monoprice.com
I have purchased via internet (won’t name the company as I’m unsure about rules for that here) two 25 foot lengths of HDMI cable for 26.50$ delivered (each) to my house in Canada. They are of far sturdier construction than anything I’ve seen in local stores (where a 6 foot cable is typically 150$ or more) and I get excellent PQ from them. I will NEVER buy HDMI cables from a brick and mortar store (in fact, I will always buy them from where I got these as long as they remain in business). The HDMI cable scam is the worst of many cable scams as it draws more people into foolishly spending their money than any other cable type.
thanks for the hitachi rec love the tv
I was wondering the same thing. There isn’t anything I know of that takes advantage of that kind of bandwidth. By the time anything actualy does, I’m sure the cheap HDMI cables will be good enough to transfer that at that time also.
What on Earth do you need 10.2 Gbps for?
That’s 10,444.8 Mbps, over 285x the read speed of 1x Blu-ray Disc.
Gotcha. I’ve never used anything longer than 5 meter HDMI cables. All of my equipment fits fairly nicely in my entertainment center, so short cables are all I need.
I am curious to know if the longer cables have ever been included in cheap vs. brand name HDMI cables. I would love to see some real results of those tests.
To clarify I was referring to long run HDMI cables.
TDF
I doubt that is true. Even if it is true, I’ve been using the cheap HDMI cables ever since I started using HDMI cables, and I’ve never been able to tell the difference between what I get and what my friends get with their nice expensive cables.
I am using BetterCable 15m (49.2″) BHDMI V1.3 with no issues. From what I have heard lower priced cables may not be able to support/guarantee Bandwidth 340 MHz (10.2 Gigabits per second)?
JD
HDMI cables do produce better picture quality than component cables, but it’s mostly the color difference that looks better. Component cables tend to bleed the colors and HDMI usually gives the color a more crips look.
When I received an HD box from Comcast cable, it came with component cable. The picture quality is great but I wonder if it would be even better with HDMI, assuming it would actually work. After reading this blog, I know that it would cost me under $6 to try an HDMI cable but why throw away a component cable if there is no improvement in picture quality. Any thoughts?
That’s becasue HDMI is digital. You are either getting the signal or not. These are one’s & zero’s.