Does the price of a HDMI cable affect the picture quality?
"Will using a £5,000 USB cable make your printer better?" asks Chris Pinder, Managing Director at
HDcable.co.uk, rhetorically. "I've been selling HDMI cables for years and I can say 100% that the technology, and specifically the price of an HDMI cable will not affect the picture quality by one pixel."
The innovations and price differences, says Chris, is to do with things like different sized connectors – slim designs for fitting better into wall-hung super-slim LED TVs, for instance – rather than materials used in the actual cables.
"Under five metre an HDMI cable made correctly cannot introduce any degradation to picture and sound quality," says Chris. "There are no subtle variants. If you have a digital photo that you email to 5,000 people, the quality will be the same on. It's the same principle with HDMI."
"There's a greater variation in how TVs are set-up in homes than differences in cable quality," says Tim O'Malley at Wavelength Distribution, which sells Supra HDMI cables. "You might find three people, each with different HDMI cables, but the quality of the picture will differ because one TV was simply unboxed and switched-on, another was adjusted by the user, and another was fully installed and calibrated by the person that sold the TV."
What makes a good HDMI cable?
One that works – there is no upgrade argument to be had. Conducting material used in the HDMI cable is all-important, though relatively standard.
All official HDMI cables use the best insulation possible, the same quality plugs, and usually solder-free
cold-welding that prevents copper strands from being joined. HDMI cables carry gigahertz of very high frequency signals that travel on the surface of conductor material – usually copper, sometimes silver.
Many HDMI cables are actually hollow since the signal travels around the outside of the cable, which is why upgraded versions for long runs tend to be silver plated, rather than solid silver.
More important is that a HDMI cable is lain flat – something that's actually tricky to do even in a basic set-up – because every bend or kink reduces the bandwidth (speed) of the cable.
On that note, steer clear of 'flat' HDMI cables; there's simply not enough room for a twisted pair of copper wires to conduct without interference.
There's another problem here that actually increases with price; the heavier the cable, the better quality is probably is … and the greater likelihood that it will fall out of, say, a TV's HDMI input. It's more evidence for those that think that the HDMI standard is poorly thought-out, riddled with basic problems and just isn't up to the job.
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