A friend rang me from PC world last weekend asking me what kind of HDMI cable he needed to connect an X-Box to his HDTV. My answer was "The cheapest 1m cable you can find". I have four HDMI cables connected to my TV (XBox, PS3, BD player and HDTV receiver and none of them cost more than €7 (two cost me €4.99) and they all work perfectly. When I met my friend later in the day he told me that the cheapest cable he could find was a Belkin 1m cable that was priced at €44 - but when he got it to the checkout at PC World the price was showing at €56! To my mind it is nothing short of a rip-off to sell a 1m HDMI cable for more than €10. Some manufacturers make inflated claims or dress up their product descriptions with marketing voodoo such as
triple-layered shielding, high-purity copper conductors, and
nitrogen gas-injected dielectric. The bottom line is that as long as the cable is HDMI 1.3 compliant it will do the job. For more details read CNET's
article.
