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slowmo on 24 April 2012
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brendude13 said:
slowmo said:


I won't get into the entire debate and I agree the guy is very obnoxious in his posts but different HDMI cables can produce different quality outputs.  The caveat is that when I say different quality it would usually mean the inferior cable suffers complete drop outs and/or a white out effect on pizels on the screen.  I personally say that a cable will either work or not as the tolerence usually is just that.  Sorry if this isn't relevant to the HDMI cable discussion you were having.

In general I forgot to mention at a short length there is rarely any difference in HDMI cables, it's only when you start to look at cables in excess of 10m where manufacturing quality will improve reliabvility and compatability with devices as the digital signal is more likely to be transmitted more reliably on cables that have less cross talk.  Better cables will also be harder to damage which can produce signal degradation too.  Despite HDMI standards some devices will naturally output stronger signals than others and some displays will be better at reconstructing a damaged or deteriotaed signal so a cable that works for one TV isn't guaranteed to work for another for example (again very long cables).

Sorry, I failed to mention that.

I did mention that a poor HDMI cable will be more likely to break and will just not work leaving a blank screen. I've heard that if you have a very long HDMI cable that is very cheap you can get artefacting, but it isn't really a drop in quality, the artefacting is more like coloured blotches and sparkles. Anybody who has this won't think that the image quality is poor, they will think that something is seriously broken.

It's a possibility that he is mistaking an anologue cable for a HDMI cable, but given his post history, I doubt it.

 

It's rather strange like you say as I do wonder what he means by obvious quality differences.  It's just impossible for the picture brightness, colour, contrast or sharpness to be different across two HDMI cables, like you say, it's artefacting that occurs.  The only possible theoretical solution I can think of is if somehow one cable was faulty to an extent that it caused some sort of weird grounding issue that affected the TV's input circuit but I've not ever really come across it before and such a faulty cable might affect TV's differently.  I personally bought a cheap Chinese 10m HDMI cable for my projector and the picture quality is perfect so I don't worry myself about them.  I do have a hideous 10m VGA cable mind you that was bought cheaply and is terrible for ghosting.