Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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157 of 163 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A $10 Cable That Does What It Needs To Do, November 25, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
Cables are a topic that really gets me steamed. Just doing a quick scan of the 6-foot HDMI cables available here on Amazon, I found more than 50 offerings ranging in price from just over $1 ($.01 for used) up to $100. Why so many to choose from and why such an outrageous variation in prices? Well, if you've ever shopped for cables, then you can guess which brand costs the most. If you read that manufacturer's description, there's a dizzying mountain of mumbo jumbo that amounts to "you'll be sorry if you don't buy this cable." But look closely at what they DON'T say. They don't say, "Our cables work better." There's a good reason for that: HDMI is a digital standard. The cable carries a digital signal. Either it works or it doesn't. Period. You will never get a blurry, grainy, fuzzy, off-color picture with *any* HDMI cable. Either you get a perfect picture or you don't get any picture at all. If the cable is poorly constructed, you might get an intermittent connection, but don't buy into the idea that one HDMI cable will give you a richer or sharper picture. It's just not true.
Here we're looking at a $10 cable that, as of this writing, has many of the features of the $100 cables. It has 24 karat gold connectors, solid copper conductors, and is HDMI 1.3a compliant. It supports the highest audio and video formats. The build quality is high but the cable itself is on the thin side at AWG 30. Many other HDMI cables are AWG 28 or thicker. But for the length of this cable, 2 meters, that really isn't an issue.
Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I spent an evening switching this cable out with a couple of others I have. No difference. I then used this cable to watch TV for a couple of days. Beautiful. The source I used was a DirecTV HR21. The TV was a new Panasonic 42" plasma with a top resolution of 1080p. I had no issues with this cable at all. The connectors remained firmly in place and the picture quality was what I expected from an HDTV. What more could you ask for?
Bottom line: Don't worry. Be happy. This $10 cable does the job.
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82 of 88 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The review is based on the quality, you need to judge the value!, November 27, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
First of all I'm an electrical and a software engineer so I'm generally not fooled by marketing information when it comes to electronics. In case you didn't know HDMI stands for High Def Multimedia Interface, and it is standardized. That is it's agreed upon by producers of the electronics they use this format to output uncompressed digital audio, as well as compressed formats, and HD video. If you use component video, a near equal standard in quality, you need 5 cables, three for video, and two for sound, and the sound is analog based. There are additional inputs that can be used for digital sound to go with component video, but they are not in the same cable like the all-in-one HDMI cables.
What's so good about this cable, and why the high rating? Well that rating would dive quickly if I thought the price were too high, I'm reviewing this Vine product without knowing the price. What I can say is the cable is very well made, reinforced on the plug ends so as not to become damaged, and has gold contacts that do not degrade. The standard is 1.3a, and essentially that is the latest, it supports newer sound formats, and something called deep color.
Why should you buy it? Well if you have the latest audio and video equipment, you may want something that supports the highest standards. You'll still want to gauge the price. I bought some HDMI cables on Amazon that were very cheap, only a few dollars each. They performed just fine for my HDTV connected to an up converting DVD player. I swapped the cable with this one, and put on an anime episode that I knew to be a bit grainy when blown up to 1080i. I changed the sound formats to the specialty ones the TV supported as well. I detected no differences at all, my previous cable was a 1.2 standard but it worked just fine. I really don't have any current components that can test the new uncompressed audio, and maybe in the future these will become popular. Then again, maybe they are only for audiophiles.
The danger is buying cables that process digital information is to overpay. Companies out there will immediately adopt the latest standards, so the price will get competitive soon. Remember this is the digital world of signals. You don't need an auto jumper cable-sized copper to transmit digital data. That's why these HDMI's can be made so small. Here is a quick tutorial on the differences between digital and analog. I have lamp cord sized copper going from my stereo to my speaker. The reason is the full amplified power up to 100 watts or more must be output to move the magnet coils in a speaker system. If the transmission were digital what would be done is the data bits would be transmitted on thin digital rated cables, just like from your USB drive to your MP3 players or computer system. Then there would be a decoder in the speaker which would decode the data, convert to an analog signal, amplify it in the speaker and drive the speaker coils to hear it. Unamplified signals do not need as much copper to transmit along wires. That means you don't need very big wires, or special quality to handle the digital signals, just enough to handle the rated volume of digital data.
Unless the cables are carelessly made they work, even the cheap ones do this if they are compliant to the latest standards. If your equipment is older you don't even need full 1.3 compliance. Electronics stores sometimes make a living selling expensive cables to make up for low margins on their component sales. This is a perfectly fine cable if the price is reasonable, if it ventures towards the half century price mark in dollars however, shop around!
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31 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great value that works fine , November 25, 2008
Customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program (What's this?)
This lower-cost HDMI cable works fine and is manufactured to last. The gold-covered connectors are encased by larger-than-normal oval rubber grips, which makes handling these plugs easier than the conventional square-edged HDMI grips. They are more comfortable to hold and to slide into, and out of, video components.
I tested this HDMI cable against the three existing HDMI cables that I have, and I found no difference in picture or audio quality between them. These tests were done between a Sony 1080p 46-inch LCD television and three components: a Motorola DVR, a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray player, and an older Sony DVD player that is being unconverted into the Sony LCD TV. I also tested this cable from a Toshiba laptop that has an HDMI output jack, and again I found no difference in picture and audio quality between this cable and the existing, and more expensive, HDMI cables that I had previously purchased.
These lower-cost HDMI cables work fine, and they are manufactured to last, and they are made to move easier between video components.
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