Friday, February 04, 2011

The Great HDMI Cable Rip-Off

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.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

A very good post and certainly these points really useful.
Expensive cables are ripping lots of people off, who don't know any better.

HDMI Switch

Simon Whitworth said...

The most common problem is that most people don`t adjust the TV settings to PC Mode and then get a irreparable washed out "composite like" desktop. They then assume that the cable they payed 12 euro for must be the culprit as other cables cost 120 euro...