HDMI Cable Prices – A High Definition Scam?
July 29th, 2010
With HD TV becoming the standard, and digital TV in full effect, HDMI cables are more in demand than ever before. But walk into a Best Buy, or Radio Shack, and you may have a dilemma on your hands. Retailers make a killing off of inflated cable prices- But are you getting what you pay for? No, not really- allow me to explain.
Back in the days of analog signal, there was much room for improvement in A/V, COAX, and other cables. Manufacturers would gold-plate the connectors, provide special shielding to avoid RF interference, and even use gas injection in the cables. This was all good, as they pass analog signal back and fourth, and these methods have been scientifically proven to aid signal quality.
But let’s remember, HDMI is DIGITAL- so it’s basically sending 1′s, and 0′s back and fourth. So you have two scenarios; either the cable works perfectly, or it doesn’t work at all.
Monster constantly boasts and brags about their HDMI cable engineering methods, but in reality, you can get a $10.00 generic HDMI cable from eBay, and get the same picture quality as an $80.00 Monster HDMI cable. Again, because it’s all digital!
Take CD-Rs for example- it wouldn’t matter what brand of CD-R you use to burn your music, it will sound the same as all the other brands. This is because it’s using 1′s and 0′s to play the music- the quality of the sound is determined by the quality in which your music files have been encoded and ripped using.
Certain vinyl records sound better than others since vinyl was analog. So the quality of the physical record was a big factor.
So if you recently bought a PS3 or something, and the HDMI was idiotically not included in the box, do yourself a favor and use my eBay link below, and click the Best Buy link for a nice chuckle.
Entry Filed under: Hardware,Hot Deals,Informative,Misc,Rants
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