As it’s the New Year I thought I’d try and get down to some of the sales, so being into all the technical stuff I stopped by one of the techy shops to see if they had any interesting gadgets in. Wandering through the TV section, I come across the TV leads and remember that I need to pick up another HDMI cable for one of my monitors. On the basis that previous cables purchased online and elsewhere have been in the single digits I’m curious as to why a high street shop would be selling them for between £50 – £250?
So here’s the deal for those of you that have just picked up a new HDTV. The £3.00 leads you get from Asda will give you the exact same image quality as a £250.00 lead from one of the so called “leading brand” companies. What intrigued me even more was when asking the staff about why the £250.00 lead was priced higher I was told: “it offers a significant increase in the image quality, there’s no lag etc etc etc”.
The truth of the matter is HDMI is a completely digital system based on binary code so if the signal is incomplete you won’t get less quality, it simply won’t work. While it’s true that there are different ratings of HDMI cable and if you tried sending a much larger image than your 1080 resolution such as 4K, through one of the Asda price cables then it would not work, but as we’ve barely moved onto High Definition that’s way down the road. As for Gold Plated vs. Silver cables – silver conducts slightly better than gold and tarnishes quicker, where as gold is a lesser conductor but will last longer.
So, if you find yourself in need of a HDMI cable for that new PS3 or Xbox, just get yourself a cheap cable off eBay for a fiver and save yourself a small fortune. Don’t get caught up in the HDMI cable scam as there is no quality difference between them.