Hi, after taking everyones advice on an LCD - bought a new 40 inch 1080p samsung series 5 for £450. Can anyone help the cables - what where and how much for a good hdmi cable to link the new tv to the xbox.
Cheers
Adam

5m Plexus HDMI cable for only £6 here. It'll be fine for the xbox, and difficult to find cheaper

Wow thats a lot cheaper than i thought. i think i only need 1m but probably best to go for 2m. My friend at PC world who helped me get the LCD cheap said expect to pay upto £80 for one!!! will quality vary a lot for the cheaper versions?

If its only a short one you need the quality is not very important.

There are loads of places and for a short one you can go cheaper than £6. Hell even home bargains had them for £1.

http://ukhdmi.com/

or eBay...

ebuyers postage can be steep for just one item unless they've changed it?

[Edited on 18/12/08 by hobbsy]

i bought a Panasonic cable from local retailer for about £30. Those above are way cheaper and probs fine. As with the recent threads on hi-fi cables there is so much bully about paying 3 fortunes for cables. Unless you have broadcast quality kit you probs wont notice any difference.

I was told the quality of the HDMI cable doesn't matter if it is only short up to 3m. Beyond that you need to start looking at better quality. I paid £20 for a decent 3m from John Lewis.

Ok thats great. Il go for a cheap one for the length i need. If its not great its not a big loss anyway and i can always opt for a better one if i need the length at a later date.
Cheers
Adam

When I bought a plasma a couple of years ago a guy from a really expensive / high-end home cinema installation company advised that so much fluff is spoken about HDMI cables & he supplied me with one that they use for about a fiver & it works great.

Only thing is if you read up in the mags they are always banging on about spending shed loads on HDMI cables.

Confusing really!! But I'm not going to worry about forking out for an expensive one. Just enjoy the yummyness of the piccy from my cheapo cable

NOOOoooooo ! You have to have the one with the unobtanium core, solid gold contacts and the low resistance insulation so the signal doesn't degrade.

forgive my stpidity but as HDMI carries a digital signal then as long as the signal of 1's & 0's get from one end to the other without problem shouldn't all the cables provide the same quality?

I am sure someone will flame me for this but its digital signal (on and offs ) and to quote my BT engineer at work you can nearly get a digital signal down a damp peice of sting. yes quality needs to be good if your switching the signal on an off very quckly. but personally a ( next one up from the cheepest ) you should be ok

Wow! If i could get the unobtanium core version as opposed to the cheap tri-plexi-corital version i have, my piccy would look soooooo much better

Thanks for the heads up Peteff.

One of my faves is directional speaker cable.

Wonder if they do directional HDMI cables too? Make sure you plug it in the right way around!

HDMI 1.2 works up to 1.65Gbps. The 165MHz is the pixel frequency. There are 10bits/pixel (using the standard 24bit color - 8 bits per RGB lane, then TMDS coding that adds 2 more bits per lane). Note that the minimum 20% to 80% transition time for HDMI 1.2 is 75 picoseconds. So even HDMI 1.2 can contain some very high frequency energy.

So the characteristic impedance (Z0) of a transmission line is the square root of (L/C). Using a large gauge only increases the capacitance minutely. Capacitance is related to the closeness of the two wires, the dielectric constant of the material between the wires, and the amount of surface area where the electric field developes. Increasing the gauge only increases the surface area component, and increases capacitance. But note that increasing the gauge decreases inductance. Inductance relates to the area between the wires, the dielectric, and the current density flowing down the wires. When gauge is increased, the inductance would decrease as long as the spacing between the wires was kept the same. So to keep the characteristic impedance the same (100ohms differential for HDMI TMDS pairs) the spacing would need to increase (to reduce capacitance). since inductance would decrease with the larger gauge.

So for the 10 gauge example. You could run high frequency signals down a 10 gauge cable if the geometry creates a matched impedance. This of course would require a large amount of dielectric material. Speaking of this situation. Imagine the transmission lines that run to television antennas. These are huge gauge "cables" that carry thousands of watts to the antennas. Check out:
http://www.dielectric.com/broadcast/catalogs/FLEXLine.pdf

No idea what it means but sounds good

quote:

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Originally posted by jabbahutt
forgive my stpidity but as HDMI carries a digital signal then as long as the signal of 1's & 0's get from one end to the other without problem shouldn't all the cables provide the same quality?

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quote:

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Originally posted by jabbahutt
forgive my stpidity but as HDMI carries a digital signal then as long as the signal of 1's & 0's get from one end to the other without problem shouldn't all the cables provide the same quality?

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Luckily at the moment i rekon i need a 1m cable so will go for something cheap and basic as at tv is on a unit but may go on the wall at some point.

gf's brother who i pretty much live with works in PC world and this tv was on a great online one day special down from £650 to £500 and he got me the extra 10% discount. He called me up told me bout the deal and i really couldnt say no as i had considered a brand new LG 37 1080p 100hz for £690 a few days earlier for a £240 difference im well happy

[Edited on 18/12/08 by bassett]

18 months ago i got a good quality 37" lcd tv in the states for £280.

very good exchange rate at the time