I broke down and got a Blu-Ray

[march.brown]

About HDMI cables and prices.

I bought two (one metre long) for £12-95 including postage from Neetcables on Ebay.

The cables have a lifetime warranty and have gold plated connectors ... They are the version 1.4 with the audio return channel and are rated up to 15.2 Gbps ... They use 28AWG oxygen-free cabling.

Can't see the point in spending more than this on a couple of digital cables ... There are cheaper available , but these are beautifully made.
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[StarHalo]

I bought two (one metre long) for £12-95 including postage from Neetcables on Ebay.

And you got screwed - it's a cable that just sends 1s and 0s, so the gold plating and other gimmickry does nothing but increase the price. 1m HDMI cables are £1.60 over on Monoprice, there's no reason for them to be more than that.

 

[blasterman]

Another cool thing about Samsung (my favorite set BTW) is that their external USB ports tend to play about any type of movie and audio format available. I've ripped movies onto thumbdrives that you simply cannot tell apart from BR, and the load times and other annoyances are significantly reduced. This is especially handy when I make my own movies from my 60D given they play cleanly at 720p after editing without having to burn to disk.

The *best* picture I've seen is the Mitsi LaserVue my old man got about a year ago. However, it took me *hours* to get the thing calibrated properly, and this process was not for the faint of heart. This thing makes plasmas seem dull when set up right, but the calibration process was absurdly difficult and the price is ridiculous.

 

[The_Driver]

Last April I got a Philips 32PFL9705/K02. It's a rather expensive 32-inch model from 2010, but it's the only 32-incher with a direct/full-led backlight with local dimming. The contrast is amazing even after all this time. Although the technology does have its downsides (the tv is a littler thicker than some other sets and when there is very small bright object in front of a very dark background you can see a halo from the backlight), but the picture is just soo much better than most other tvs. The only thing better are plasma and in a few years oled displays.

 

[js]

So actually, 16:9 WAS overscanning, and screenfit is the one that is 1:1. Good thing I checked! So, that list above should have screen-fit for size, IF your Blu-ray or Cable box is set to output 16:9, so that it adds the black bars when appropriate.

StarHalo,

It's not quite as simple as you suggest. First gold plating is good for resisting oxidation, so it's not like it's useless! Second, the more data you squeeze through a cable, the better the construction needs to be. This relates to the dialectric/sheathing, and most of all, to the tightness and evenness of the twist of the wires inside the cable. The 1's and 0's you speak of are actually SIGNALS down the cable. Push the data-rate too high, and these signals can't be resolved into 1's and 0's because of dispersion, cross-talk, and other interferences. Third, I've purchased some cheap crappy cables (cat5e ethernet) and while they WORKED, they STUNK. Like, literally. Really bad. God what an odor! I was trying to save a few bucks and it was only 50 feet, and I was like, HA!, Amazon has a 50' cat5e for $12 (or whatever it was). But I wasted that money--or rather, I had to go to the bother of returning it. And I ended up buying a more expensive cable that I knew didn't smell bad. Some of the more expensive cables just FEEL better--the insulation is more supple, doesn't stink, has a better color, or whatever.

I agree that it's stupid to spend a lot of money on cables, but I disagree that there is NO reason to spend more than the minimum. And I also suspect that full 1080p 3D blu-ray content may actually push the data-rate up to where SOME of the really cheap cables MAY start to experience data loss. But maybe I'm wrong. Don't know. Personally, if I were buying another HDMI cable, I'd get one of the ones from Amazon for $10 and I wouldn't worry. I would NOT get one of the $50 ones from Best Buy, though! LOL! OK. Well, just my $0.02.

 

[blasterman]

More expensive HDMI cables simply have better termination, but that's about it. There are common industry specifications for these things, and one does not re-write the specification because you are selling a higher mark-up cable. As it is, 1080p HD does not approach the transmission levels of generic CAT5 ethernet cable, and we know how cheap that junk is. If a specific HDMI cable failed the RFC specification at 1080p it's because that cable was not made to specification. Audio and video philes have tried to push their nonsense into the digital realm for years (cheap cables introduce jitter) but it falls flat.

 

[march.brown]

More expensive HDMI cables simply have better termination, but that's about it. There are common industry specifications for these things, and one does not re-write the specification because you are selling a higher mark-up cable. As it is, 1080p HD does not approach the transmission levels of generic CAT5 ethernet cable, and we know how cheap that junk is. If a specific HDMI cable failed the RFC specification at 1080p it's because that cable was not made to specification. Audio and video philes have tried to push their nonsense into the digital realm for years (cheap cables introduce jitter) but it falls flat.

I'm happy with my "expensive" gold-plated , lifetime warranty HDMI leads ... I found that the non-gold-plated ones needed to be waggled about occasionally to make better contact ... It does seem strange though that some Hi-Fi magazine equipment-reviewers report that they can definitely detect a visual and/or audible difference between the different digital interconnects ... In theory , as long as all the 0's and 1's get through the cable correctly and at the same time , there should be no difference between the different HDMI leads (cheap or expensive) ... This is assuming that the cables have identical characteristic impedance and bandwidth and are the same length and have the same shielding as each other ... But I'm still happy with my purchase as they are so much better in build quality than the freebies and cheapies that I have now given away.
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[Lite_me]

So actually, 16:9 WAS overscanning, and screenfit is the one that is 1:1. Good thing I checked! So, that list above should have screen-fit for size, IF your Blu-ray or Cable box is set to output 16:9, so that it adds the black bars when appropriate.

Great! Glad you straightened it out. When overscanning is set correctly, at least as far as picture quality goes, you'll sometimes see white dashes across the top of the screen. Mostly on 4:3 content but occasionally on 16:9 also. It's information embedded in the video. Probably closed captioning but could be other things. Actually, I don't mind it as it isn't all that often, and it reminds me that I have my TV set correctly for optimum detail.