The only reason to buy a premium digital cable is that they're generally better built, and therefore less likely to fall apart, than cheap ones. That said, unless you're re-arranging your equipment a lot, that's quite unlikely to be a problem anyway…

There's definitely some value in including an HDMI cable as they're fundamentally useful, but if it costs more than another card plus cheapo cable I'd always go for the latter.

I'm still amazed by the number of people who claim that pricey cables give “…brighter colours and deeper blacks…” without taking a second to consider that it's impossible for the reasons you state in the article. It's digital, people!

Gah, I'm sick of this snake oil crap.

There are only two reasons to build a digital cable out of better/tighter-spec components:

1) To be within specifications (i.e. having a nicely open eye-diagram/below min-spec bit-error rate) over a longer transmission distance.

2) Make it less likely to fall apart.


A digital cable either meets the specs for a certain cable length, or it doesn't - in which case it shouldn't be sold. And yet people still fall for this snake-oil nonsense. :angst:

I given up trying to explain a digital cable is a digital cable to people - I just have a big smile on my face whenever I see someone purchase one. Still its no different to PC world charging £15 for a Belkin USB cable when Tesco do a non-belkin for £3 and Ebuyer for about 80p!

You should see what state the signals end up in on the PCBs within the hardware the cables are connected to.

Having anything other than an adequate digital cable is pointless, from a signal point of view at least. From a build-quality perspective, maybe.

Unfortunately, unlike say an IDE cable, an HDMI looks a lot like an analogue cable, making it easier to push the same cost=quality sales techniques.

I was having my hair cut just the other day when one of the hair dressers was strongly advising his customer to spend £50 on a ‘decent’ HDMI cable for his new Playstation, in order to get a sharper picture…

What we need is a high res scope so we can look at the signal just as it enters the monitor.

No point looking at it open circuit because it might not transmit, and the signal will look different without a load on the end of it.

Still, would allow us to compare cables.

Bought a £4 HDMI cable for my mate's PS3 the other day and it's absolutley fine, is actually flat profile so could be run under the carpet. Got 1.8m even though it was advertised as 1.5m, so overall pretty chuffed. Comet tried to sell my friend an A-B printer USB cable for £10! And that was bought with the printer, on its own the cable was 15! Feel sorry for the people who fall for it tbh, always trying to get my mum and dad to buy stuff online instead of getting ripped off in the shops.

I bought a £400 anti-matter-free HDMI cable and I swear the pixie dust tastes better now.

dangel
I bought a £400 anti-matter-free HDMI cable and I swear the pixie dust tastes better now.

:lol:

Subtle :P

But that's exactly it isn't it?.. HDMI streams are a digitally encoded signal, it doesn't matter if the HDMI cable cost 50p to make, or £10,000. What you put in is exactly the same thing as you get out of it. But you have cowboys like these trying to make out like their £60-300 HDMI cables will propel you into hyperspace. It should be banned as misleading advertising, because that's exactly what it is.

aidanjt
But that's exactly it isn't it?.. HDMI streams are a digitally encoded signal, it doesn't matter if the HDMI cable cost 50p to make, or £10,000. What you put in is exactly the same thing as you get out of it. But you have cowboys like these trying to make out like their £60-300 HDMI cables will propel you into hyperspace. It should be banned as misleading advertising, because that's exactly what it is.

Well, no. Not quite.

Digital signals do suffer signal loss, the loss correction is just a lot more efficient than on analogue. There's two factors that lead to a bad picture over a HDMI cable; cable length and the amount of data being sent down the cable. At lengths greater than 5 meters with a 1080p24 signal you will start to suffer signal loss and (pretty quickly) signal drop out. Likewise, if you pump even more data down the cable then the length of cable you can get away with becomes shorter and shorter. Higher quality cables combat the drop out and allow you to use longer cables or simply pump more data down the cable.

In the case of these Graphics Cards though there's no point in them bundling these cables whatsoever.

aidanjt
HDMI streams are a digitally encoded signal, it doesn't matter if the HDMI cable cost 50p to make, or £10,000. What you put in is exactly the same thing as you get out of it.

That's a very naive understanding of digital signalling. Just because us humans claim that the signal is “digital”, doesn't mean that the nasty analogue reality of our universe can't bite you in the ass.

The quality of the cable is important, but if a cheap cable can transmit the digital signal successfully, then having a cable 10 times as expensive that can also transmit the digital signal successfully is just a waste of money. The ones and zeros at the far end of the cable are the same in either case.

:P

You can get HDMI Cables for £3.49 and they are premium tooo.
I think the GFX manufactures are not making anything on the Graphics cards want customers to pay for cables and make their margin. Good try

:stupid: