HDMI Cable Test

[Grassy]

I ran head on into this video and thought it was rather funny in its own way.It makes me wonder about the snake oil in our hobby and how some off these companies make there moneyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxfLXH6qe9w

 

[j_garcia]

Well, it was Monster. Does that surprise anyone at all that it didn't live up to its claims? Of course not.

 

[BMXTRIX]

I'm pretty much done with the expensive cable garbage. For short runs, I use ultra-thin flexible HDMI cables exclusively. From either Parts Express or Monoprice. I hated the Monoprice ones at first because of their packaging a 1' cable in a big box. I know that's silly, but I carry 40+ cables with me for installations, so unboxing a ton of cables sucked and didn't make them appear 'new' when they were. Now they've gone to bagged packaging, so either one is great.

My tests of the cables have been on a $10,000 Fluke HDMI tester, and they have all passed 1920x1200@60Hz without issue, which is pretty much the upper limits of HDMI 1.4a cabling.

I do not have access to a 18Gb/s HDMI tester for HDMI 2.0 cabling, but would love to be able to do that at some point as well.

Under 6', if someone is still suckered in by expensive cabling, then I'm done trying to convince them or anyone. If they are my client, I let them know ahead of time if I can. I had a client recently get suckered in with both HDMI cables and pricey mounts from Best Buy. I asked if it was all still in the box, and they said it was. They returned everything and the amount of money they got back, paid for the mounts I installed, the HDMI cables I installed, and all my labor to install everything for them, and they got to eat out that night and have a few bucks left over.

Too easy today to find out that expensive cables aren't worth it.

 

[William Lemmerhirt]

Seen those guys before. Good stuff. I have the same green screwdriver. It's from snap-on tools.

 

[Grassy]

I'm pretty much done with the expensive cable garbage. For short runs, I use ultra-thin flexible HDMI cables exclusively. From either Parts Express or Monoprice. I hated the Monoprice ones at first because of their packaging a 1' cable in a big box. I know that's silly, but I carry 40+ cables with me for installations, so unboxing a ton of cables sucked and didn't make them appear 'new' when they were. Now they've gone to bagged packaging, so either one is great.

My tests of the cables have been on a $10,000 Fluke HDMI tester, and they have all passed 1920x1200@60Hz without issue, which is pretty much the upper limits of HDMI 1.4a cabling.

I do not have access to a 18Gb/s HDMI tester for HDMI 2.0 cabling, but would love to be able to do that at some point as well.

Under 6', if someone is still suckered in by expensive cabling, then I'm done trying to convince them or anyone. If they are my client, I let them know ahead of time if I can. I had a client recently get suckered in with both HDMI cables and pricey mounts from Best Buy. I asked if it was all still in the box, and they said it was. They returned everything and the amount of money they got back, paid for the mounts I installed, the HDMI cables I installed, and all my labor to install everything for them, and they got to eat out that night and have a few bucks left over.

Too easy today to find out that expensive cables aren't worth it.

Some off these cable companies have a fair bit to answer for as far as being competitive with a decent cable that has been sold for less than half the price.I do understand though that it makes sense to put a quality tire on a quality car(match the hatch) but where do we draw the line.I tend to think that it's not that the expensive cables are no good,i think that there is so much competition out there now(and with technology changing) that a lot off these companies are living on their names and people are brain washes into thinking that nothing else will do the job as good.And just to add to that, its obvious to me now that some of these cable companies refuse to budge and still even now have very high prices on there products even though they know that. It says a lot as to what they think of the consumer and their own personal greed.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

All my cables are inexpensive and from Amazon Prime these days.

The last few HDMI and CAT6 cables I bought were like $2 each.

 

[BMXTRIX]

...it makes sense to put a quality tire on a quality car...

This is, IMO, the play that draws consumers in. They do hours of research to find a top tier display, but don't spend one second on cabling. So, they go out, get the best price on the display they can get, and the store makes $100 or so on a $2,000 display (not kidding). But, then they make $400 profit on the mount and the cabling.

You put QUALITY tires on a quality car. But, the correlation between price and quality is simply non-existent in the cabling world. The real competition lies at the $10 price point, not the $100 price point. If you saw 10 tires for your quality car at $200, and one brand priced at $2,000, you should not question all the $200 tires, but the one $2,000 tire. The same is true of cables. What makes that $100 cable ten times better than the $10 cable? What makes it $5 better? In the car world, I'm sure there are ridiculously overpriced tires, but I've seen mostly good competitive pricing in that market. When I go into stores, they don't pressure me for the $400 tires, they just give me some options, and typically don't know very much about the differences themselves as to why one tire is $120 and another is $250.

Companies like Monster, and others, are profit centers for retail stores. Heck, the cables I buy at $5-$10 I tend to make 100% profit on, so they are a profit center for the work I do. But, I don't mark them up to $50 or $100 and then run through a hard sale on them to my customers. It's typically just an extra 10 bucks a cable times 3 or 4 cables. Enough to fill my gas tank perhaps.