NOTE: For the geeky extreme technical stuff like power consumption, see "TECHNICAL DETAIL" toward the bottom.

I regularly do "tethered capture" with my DSLR. (In other words, I connect my camera to my computer while I'm actually taking photos so I can see the processed images as I take them.) Since it's practically impossible to have your camera connected to a computer with a 5' cable and still use it to take photos, I ordered the AmazonBasics USB 2.0 A-Male to A-Female Extension Cable (9.8 Feet/3.0 Meters) (which is a very good quality product for the price). Combined with the 5' cable my now 15' total length cable was really quite sufficient for most photography in the small studio bay I was using... well, most of the time.

So I decided that I needed even more freedom to move around, and ordered this extension cable. I haven't used it much yet, but I ran some tests with my camera + 5' cable +10' extension + this 32' cable and had no connection problems over 3 hours or so of constantly staying connected and visible to the software. Note that I didn't use the cable with "live view" (same as having the computer use the camera as a remote video camera, basically) so there weren't data constantly being transmitted, but I did take lots of photos at various times (filling up the camera's RAM buffer so it's transmitting as fast as possible) and no issues there.

The repeater on this cable is all the way on the far-side (away from the computer, etc) rather than in the middle of the cable. This is good because the repeater is a hub, and this lets you get another 5m of cable length with a regular cable. My guess is that you should also be able to connect at least one more active cable to this one as well.

Note that the USB limit on cable length (5m or about 15') still applies to the repeater. So my 15' normal cable with no repeater is the longest normal cable that you can plug into an active extension cable. Longer than that and it may not work so well depending on whether or not the repeater exceeds USB specs or something.

Another thing to be aware of is that the repeater uses up USB bus power. A normal "high power" USB port supplies 500mA, and the repeater claims that it needs 100mA to power itself. Since the repeater has no other power source, it can't "pass through" more than 400mA. (These values are approximate since, in reality, the amount of power is going to differ from what the hardware and specs say it should be.) Therefore if you use the cable to connect up a bus powered USB device (one that doesn't normally need to be plugged into the wall because it gets all of its power via USB), it can't be one that uses more than around 400mA. If it does, then the device will exhibit erratic behavior or fail to work at all because the repeater will incorrectly tell the device that it has 500mA on its 400mA port. (See TECHNICAL DETAIL below for the excruciating detail.)

The female connector on the cable has a tight fit which is good since it would otherwise be too easy for the next cable to fall out.

Lastly, I like this product overall and figure that it's similar to other such cables, but for what I do I wish the cabling were more flexible like the previously mentioned Amazon Basics 10' cable (which lays on the floor like a piece of nylon rope). This is no doubt a trade-off with the fact that the thing has thick shielding and thick outer insulation which has the benefit of making it more durable. The amount of flexibility is only going to matter to you if you're using the cable with a handheld device though, since it's perfectly fine for fixed placement behind desks and such. So for most people this extra durability tradeoff is all gain.

I'd give this 5 stars, but I'm subtracting a star for the fact that the repeater falsely claims an output of 500mA when "asked" by a device via the USB protocol. Normally this will NOT be an issue for people as long as they realize that they can't use the cable with a "full power" USB device like the USB-Powered Portable LED Monitor I have. Since the cable flexibility won't be an issue for most people, and arguably it's worth the extra durability, I wouldn't lower the rating for that.

TECHNICAL DETAIL

Non-engineers can ignore this section.
The repeater is actually a full USB hub and is detected as such by the USB drivers.

I decided that I wanted to figure out exactly what was going on with the repeater power-wise (after all, the thing must be consuming some power and can't pass all 500mA through it), so I did a bit of USB logging/probing to see what it was telling the USB driver on my mac. I used the standard OS X utility "USB Prober" along with the USB kernel extension for logging USB events and querying devices for their descriptors. The cable was plugged directly into a port on the MacBook.

First off, the repeater is using a generic 4 port USB hub chip(set) which says it's made by Terminus Technology Inc. Even though it says it has 4 ports, obviously only one of them has a connector, resulting in a "1 port hub" as odd as that sounds. The repeater is telling the USB controller (root hub) in the computer that it needs 100mA (out of the 500mA) fom the port. Essentially that's how much power it "asks" for and how much it claims the hub/repeater hardware needs. Assuming that it's not lying and actually using significantly less or more than 100mA, that leaves 400mA that it can use to power it's own port.

So the repeater is basically telling the computer that it's a self-powered hub (such as the type you plug into a wall), but "self powering" itself off of the bus power from the port on the computer instead of a wall wart. This isn't toally unreasonable, but the repeater is *claiming* to downstream devices that it's single powered port will supply 500mA. Obviously that's not going to happen unless the thing contains a free energy machine or something.

So if you plug a device that uses 400mA (or however much is available on the port in reality) or less then you should be OK; the bus power "passes through" the repeater with (what it claims is) 100mA drained off of it. So your device gets power.

Unfortunately, if you plug in a device that "asks" for and needs 500mA of power (or more than 400 anyway), the repeater will falsely claim that it can supply 500mA on the port. As a result, the attached device won't get the power it needs and will exibit some sort of dysfunctional behavior depending on what it is. Sometimes this may be immediately obvious, but some devices may fail at random during usage when they suddenly try to use full power. Normally the hub wouldn't "lie" about the power and so this wouldn't happen. (I beileve the chipset that they're using isn't capable of "believing" it has less than 500mA on one of it's powered ports. This in fact may be true of all USB hub chipsets for all I know. But this chipset, unlike more sophisticated ones, does say that it isn't capable of tracking different amounts of power usage on different ports, so it may simply assume 500mA on all ports and have no ability to track total power available.)

This probably isn't terribly bad as you can't expect an active repeater to consume no power, thus there's no way you can get 500mA through such a cable no matter what. And as long as your aware of the issue (essentially some bus-powered devices will work and some won't) then you'll have some idea what you can use it for.

I don't know how many of these cables you are supposed to be able to connect in series, but in theory you should be able to connect more, using up another 100mA for each one. The repeater on each cable is going to claim it can output 500mA, making the current mismatch issue worse as you go. The signal delay caused by so many hubs in series might make this impractical before you ran out of current though. I'm pretty sure you should be able to connect 2 of these in series, but I'm not sure I'd try more than that. It's also going to depend on whether the cable is plugged into a hub that's plugged into a hub, etc, because USB has a maximum "depth" (number of hubs that can be connected in series) and will just refuse to work beyond that.

Connected my Microsoft LifeCam Studio 1080p HD webcam to it so I could keep an eye on the kids this summer. It took about 15 or 20 seconds (only on the initial plugging in) after connecting the webcam to the cable and the cable to the pc for it to recognize the webcam and start it. Runs flawlessly! No signal loss or signal interference of any kind. Video streaming through it is clean crisp and with no delay whatsoever.

Its just a simple plug and play cable, no software to download/install and it couldn't have been any easier to setup. No additional power sources or hubs needed. I will definitely be buying more of these for backups and for other pc's here at home.

I'm running it on a Windows 7 PC from a front USB 2.0 port.

Very impressed. We use many of these in classrooms to run projectors and smartboards and they have been completely reliable. With computers in the back of the classroom, the projectors up front and high ceilings, standard USB cables can't be used. We tries video-over-IP adapters but experienced freeze-ups. These Plugable cables did the trick - the price is good and you can use several for even longer distances. These are all we buy now.

This cable is great I have a Studio and the workstation is about 20 ft from the vocal booth. I have a 23" Dell touch screen in the booth connected with this cable. It even will let me tether shot with my A6300 and Capture One Pro 9 for Sony. This is how it is connected:
This cable from my workstation PC USB 3.0 to a USB 3.0 cable that came with my Dell Monitor it is 6 ft long. The monitor has a 4 USB3.0 hub inside I have a 15 foot USB 3.0 cable plugged into the monitor hub. The cable is like this one as it is a powered extender but USB 3.0, and last I have a 4 ft USB2.0 to micro USB plugged into the A6300 and it all works perfectly. I can see a live view of the A6300 with no lag and it transfers RAW images in about 2 seconds per photo and I'm able to control the camera from the Dell touch screen all in real time with no lag and about 57 ft of USB cable in total.

Love the length (wanted to be able to mount wifi adapter outside) but HATE the fact it will apparently overheat and stop functioning, time and time again - never stays on very long !!

I use it for a wifi adapter and it works ok for maybe 15 mins or less then it seems to shut down, and I have to disconnect and reconnect to get it recognized. It does not seem to get great wifi signals either - I think the equalization for the cable length is not engineered well - just thrown together I suspect.

I bought 2 (TWO) and they both perform identically-BAD, so I either got 2 bad ones or it is not engineered well - POS !!

While I have 2 20 foot extensions that work lovely, just not long enuf - may swap the active ends from older extension to this one and see if it performs differently.