http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/08/wireworlds-platinum-starlight-hdmi-cable-is-only-1-000-better/
It is interesting when the blogger on engadget actually sais “You probably think you’re getting the whole 1080p, don’t you! Boy, you couldn’t be more wrong”
I have to disagree on that one. And Yes I am getting my whole 1080p with a cheap $5 HDMI cable.
They say here that this cable is supposed to be better than the whole monster cables which were supposed to be amazing. Anyway I have to disagree with all the cables, unless the HDMI is analogic.
I know that whenever a signal is digital, error correction can be done on it, therefore even if let’s assume 10% of the information is lost, we get full quality picture. That is the theory on all digital devices. Have you ever had a CD that had some severe scratches and it still played fine? Well that is because of the error correction. Furthermore the buffer under run protection in CD/DVD writers is based on that. If the buffer gets depleted, the writing stops and it’s resumed when enough data is accumulated into the buffer to continue writing. If that would be an audio CD we should hear the gap of the error, right? Well, no. Because the information is digital and error correction can be done on it, therefore the continuous play of the CD.
The same with the HDMI. HDMI means: HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is a compact audio/video interface for transmitting uncompressed digital data. The keyword is digital here. If the signal is digital then doesn’t matter what type of cable we have because as long as enough signal gets to the TV where error correction can be done successfully then we get the entire picture without any loss of quality.
To me it is a myth when they say that this cable is gold plated or silver or platinum plated and the quality is better. Total BS, because all that I have studied says the contrary. If the signal is digital and enough to get error corrected, then the quality should be identical with any cable.
For example, the Dish systems claim that if the signal strength is above certain percentage the image should be crystal clear, and only when it drops below that we get to see problems. Most of you out there must have experienced the satellite dish glitches, the images get pixelated. Based on this premise, has any of you seen (the low signal dish effect) with a low quality HDMI cable? Cuz I have a piece of S..T HDMI cable and I never seen the similar effect on my TV.
Since I haven’t done any research on this at all, in the sense of testing cables with special measurement instruments (like vectorscopes and alike), I can’t guarantee that I am totally right, but mathematically speaking any cable should get the same job done. Because there are no images transmitted through the cable, there are only binary code (ones and zeroes) that get processed by the TV. Therefore the image should be flawless unless the cable is defective or the HDMI standard is not really digital.
To me HDMI is a hoax to scalp or speculate the market for more money, because I have heard a rumor that HDMI capacity has been exceeded by the technological demands of today, so they will have to refit all TV’s with Dual DVI again which allows for a lot more data transfer than HDMI therefore better image quality. So then all of us will have to buy new TV’s because the DVI isn’t there in the latest TV sets.
Perhaps the MythBusters can actually do a test and solve our problem. But for the record, given all the premises I gave you, you could ask and computer scientist and they should say the same thing. If the signal is digital, then the cable just has to be functional. No gold silver or diamond plated BS. And why in the hell I would buy a Cable that is more expensive than my whole TV?
Sources: Engadget and Wikipedia.
