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Why HDMI Cables Should Be Cheap
Published by Matthew Jeppsen October 5th, 2007 in Formats, Hardware, News, Research 
We’ve talked about the HDMI standard and HDMI cables in the past here at FreshDV, but I was encouraged to look deeper at this recently by reader Robert Shaver. In the course of our conversation he passed along an excellent article link that addresses the origins of the HDMI standard, and why consumers are being mis-lead about the need for specialty cables.
“Companies have developed and very effectively marketed their co-axial, twin-axial, dual-shielded and triple-shielded cables to the confused DVI / HDMI consumer. Various dire consequences can result from the use of ‘cheap’ cables… or so the simple consumer is educated by such companies.Figure 2 illustrates an HDMI cable, shown approximately at one-half scale, and Ethernet cables [9] following industry standards at approximately their actual sizes. The HDMI cable is substantially thicker and inflexible presumably because of shielding architecture incorporated within. This naturally increases the cost of the cable assembly.
But do HDMI cables have to be double and triple-shielded in such manner, when data is transmitted through wire pairs within in low-swing, differential, low-EMI manner? Or is such cable architecture necessary for the high data rates required for high-definition video transmission? Studies conducted most recently at ComLSI, disclosed in [4, 5], show that Cat-5e cabling can be just as good from a signal transmission and reception perspective over very significant lengths (25m+) as any advanced cable architecture. A prior paper goes farther, disclosing SXGA video transmission over 300 meters of Cat 5 cabling…”
4 Responses to “Why HDMI Cables Should Be Cheap”
- 1 Pingback on Oct 6th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
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I agree. There’s little sense in paying $60 for a 2m HDMI cable, when in most cases, $6 will do fine for most people, for now. Just about any 2m HDMI will properly pass 1080p without issue.
Now, there are standards that are supposedly coming, 1440p and 1080p with deep color, but paying $60 now for cable quality that you don’t need until maybe three to five years from now is silly. By then, the cheap $6 cable probably would have been improved beyond that, so rather than spend $60 now, you spend $10 ($6 shipping) now, and $10 later. That’s a lot less money out the window. We don’t even know if the industry won’t try to force a different connector standard on us by then anyway.
Check out monoprice.com; I just picked up two nice, thick HDMI 2m cables there for only $12! Sounds crazy, I know. Got there from HD4NDs, and mine work great.
I don’t think it’s the extra shielding or any other construction that’s increasing the price– it’s just artificially increased because the consumers don’t know any better.
Allan W.’s suggestion for http://monoprice.com is a good one– they have loads of cheap cables that do the job.
For those who need perhaps more attention to construction, or analog cables that are within spec and reasonably priced, also check out Blue Jeans cable– look at their HDMI selection– a 7 foot hand-constructed cable for $21!
http://www.bluejeanscable.com/store/dvi/index.htm