HDMI cables

[Animeniax]

Is an HDMI cable an HDMI cable an HDMI cable, or do you get what you pay for? I got a $15 one from Belkin and it seems to work fine. I've never believed in buying the expensive Monster cables, but I don't know much about HDMI so maybe it matters.

[David75]

Is an HDMI cable an HDMI cable an HDMI cable, or do you get what you pay for? I got a $15 one from Belkin and it seems to work fine. I've never believed in buying the expensive Monster cables, but I don't know much about HDMI so maybe it matters.

Well, the debate is unclear for short cables yet.

For longer ones, you may eventually have a restricted colorspace, ie colors not as deep as what you should get. For some reason HDMI isn't "all or nothing" as it should be for purely numerical transportation of AV data.

Then you have several flavors of HDMI, I may be sligtly wrong:
HDMI 1.1
HDMI 1.3a
HDMI 1.3b
HDMI 1.3b cat2

The .3x are said to be able to carry better sound quality such as uncompressed numerical formats (True HD, Master HD)
the .b I think is the one having the capability to transport the best colorspace is available from the player/disc and TV/projector

I thnink that the Cat2 part is for the quality of the cable, or the ability to have even better resolution than FullHD@60Hz

I may be wrong, but you get the idea that marketing is pretty fucked up ever since the introduction of high resolution "market"...

You'll understand it's hard to answer regarding your particular cable, but be aware that your player and TV must be up to the HDMI 1.XY format to use the max settings, the disc itself then has to be encoded with the fancy features too.

[darkshadow]

There is no difference between hdmi 1.3a-1.3c, all hdmi cables, even the 1.0 ones can display 1200p@60hz no problem, the 1.3 ones can just go to 1600p@75hz and have a lot more support for stuff like bitstreaming trueHD, masterHD audio like david75 said.
Again, there are no feature differences between 1.3a-1.3c.

And about differences between cables, digital is digital, all the data that gets output, is the exact same data that arrives at the input.
The only bad thing about digital cables is, that if there is a fault in the cable, that data is lost forever.
The monster cable types do have perfect cables but they are very overpriced, so if you don't notice anything odd with your lowerprice cable, I say stick with it.

[iMUSTbeTHEdevil]

Monoprice.com has really good prices on HDMI cables.

And I actually found a 6ft HDMI from biglots for $12, which is more than Monoprice, but no shipping...

[LaZie]

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/hdmi-cable-battlemodo/the-truth-about-monster-cable-part-2-268788.php