Brand new TV with fault no refund

Toxteth_OGrady

There are as many arguments for premium HDMI cables as there are against.

Please provide links with objective evidence.

I have gone from a £2 cable to Monster to Audi Pearl and I can tell the difference.

How? Because you have spent more you are pre-disposed to believing that.

Like many things, its subjective to ones owns views and tastes...The reviews you posted are just three different people's opinions, some people see things others cannot.

No it's not. It's a digital signal. The links I posted provide objective evidence based on reproducible tests.

For examplethere are people that can’t tell the difference between speakers that cost £1000 and speakers that cost £10,000.

I agree with you that comparing analogue audio components is subjective and generally a £10k speaker will sound a lot better than a £1k one. However a 1m working £1 HDMI digital cable will have identical reproduction to a £100 one.

More reading here:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20056502-1/why-all-hdmi-cables-are-the-same/

Bottom line however is that if you are happy to spend your money in that way then that's absolutely fine. We can agree to disagree.

Toxteth_OGrady

p.s. I assume for your Sky HD viewing that, as well as improving the picture with a metre of expensive cable from your Sky box to the TV, you've improved the picture even more by replacing the several metres of co-ax between the Sky dish and the box that's carrying the same digital signal?

Or for internet HD video streaming the many kilometres of bog standard BT phone cable?

[Deleted User]

Toxteth_OGrady wrote: »

Bottom line however is that if you are happy to spend your money in that way then that's absolutely fine. We can agree to disagree.

Yes, I doubt you'll change the OP's mind-especially as the OP has already splashed the cash on the expensive cable.
Personally, I think it's wise to buy connecting cables which are neither so cheap that they lack durability nor so expensive that they cease to have any distinct advantage.
I'm reminded of the old arguments from the analogue days about expensive SCART cables with gold plated plugs...

Ratboy

I already posted that the vision problem could be caused by patternation due to poor quality leads, or the room is too small to view the large TV in, but the OP says those issues have been dealt with;

And also that a TV Engineer has inspected the TV, and confirmed that it has a fault.

So why has the OP not been refunded or repaired equipment, and this thread goes on?

A lot of time, buying a lead that a magazine says is good, there is a placebo effect.But my £75 scart lead makes my picture better, and my TV better than any cheap rate LCD screen, unfortunately, how long are CRT screens designed to last?

[Deleted User]

Ratboy wrote: »

So why has the OP not been refunded or repaired equipment, and this thread goes on?

I guess you haven't read post #21:D
I think the thread has rather moved on from the original topic.

Ratboy wrote: »

my £75 scart lead makes my picture better, and my TV better than any cheap rate LCD screen, unfortunately, how long are CRT screens designed to last?

I had those expensive SCARTS back in the day. Pretty much well established that the gold connections did little to improve picture quality.
I agree a good quality CRT is still miles better than any bargain flat panel screen, even in high definition. However, you'll never get a CRT screen bigger than about 36" and they are no longer in production.

keith1950

Ratboy-Expensive scart leads are a waste of money. The biggest problem with cheaper scart leads is cross-modulation due to poor screening ,by opening the scart plug at the tv end and cutting the video output lead cures the problem.

Most TV's have in-build minor design issues that are within specification that the customer grows to live with, it is usually only the less well informed that make an issue of it.

As an example, some customers would kick off about one missing pixel at the edge of a screen when it is well documented that the industry sets out what is and is not acceptable.

almillar

Toxeth - I'm not going to lecture you on £100 HDMI cables, but I must call you out on this 'it's digital!' thing. Digital Freeview signals can be weak, Digital CDs can skip etc etc. For 'digital' cables - USB, SATA, HDMI, SPDIF, coax and umpteen others, there's bandwidth, or speed. Specifically with HDMI, it's not so much a problem now even with £1 cables, but cheapo cables would cause jumping, picture dropouts or blockiness, due to not being able to carry a large amount of information quickly enough. You might find they were perfectly good (pixel perfect indeed) on a 1080i Sky box, but would have problems on a fast moving 1080p game on a PS3. That's not a personal attack, and I'm not telling people to buy expensive cables, but cable quality DOES matter. It just so happens that these days a good enough quality cable has come down in price a lot!

Toxteth_OGrady

almillar wrote: »

Toxeth - I'm not going to lecture you on £100 HDMI cables, but I must call you out on this 'it's digital!' thing. Digital Freeview signals can be weak, Digital CDs can skip etc etc. For 'digital' cables - USB, SATA, HDMI, SPDIF, coax and umpteen others, there's bandwidth, or speed. Specifically with HDMI, it's not so much a problem now even with £1 cables, but cheapo cables would cause jumping, picture dropouts or blockiness, due to not being able to carry a large amount of information quickly enough. You might find they were perfectly good (pixel perfect indeed) on a 1080i Sky box, but would have problems on a fast moving 1080p game on a PS3. That's not a personal attack, and I'm not telling people to buy expensive cables, but cable quality DOES matter. It just so happens that these days a good enough quality cable has come down in price a lot!

I'm using the 'it's digital' solely as a counter to the subjective 'improvement in picture/audio quality' argument that rightly belongs to the analogue domain. Some people mistakenly believe that even with a pixel perfect signal an expensive cable will provide sharper, clearer, richer... (pick your adjective). It's simply untrue.

If it's a 10 pence HDMI cable and it works to the HDMI standard of passing the required number of 1s and 0s along its length then the picture will never get any better.

If it doesn't, then the picture will be effectively unwatchable.

Of course all cables have bandwidth, speed, loss and error limitations.

but cheapo cables would cause jumping, picture dropouts or blockiness, due to not being able to carry a large amount of information quickly enough.

As would expensive ones - they would not be performing to the defined standard (Standard HDMI or High Speed HDMI) and would be deemed faulty.

For your Sky HD 1080i vs PS3 1080p example, the problem would only occur if either the wrong type of cable were used, i.e. Standard HDMI that only supports 1080i vs High Speed HDMI that supports 1080p or, irrespective of price, if the cable were faulty.

It's strange, or perhaps not, that we don't see the same kind of circular argument threads about cheap vs expensive SATA III or Cat 5e cables.

Ratboy

keith1950 wrote: »

Ratboy-Expensive scart leads are a waste of money. The biggest problem with cheaper scart leads is cross-modulation due to poor screening ,by opening the scart plug at the tv end and cutting the video output lead cures the problem.

Most TV's have in-build minor design issues that are within specification that the customer grows to live with, it is usually only the less well informed that make an issue of it.

As an example, some customers would kick off about one missing pixel at the edge of a screen when it is well documented that the industry sets out what is and is not acceptable.

To the extreme, expensive leads are a waste of money, but weighing up the options, between the quality of the equipment used, then using a 50p cable, or going overboard is a waste.

I would like to point out that I have made various cables, including RF, SCART, DIN, BNC, ps/2, CAT3/5 connections for my work at various points, and can confidently say that better quality cable produces a better result, and that costs money. So pay more, but not stupid more.

almillar

Agree Toxeth. My point being that the cheapo one probably isn't as well labelled as well as any potential lower quality.
I bet a lot of people would buy something for £5 that said HDMI v1.2 vs one that wasn't labelled at all, whereas they should now be looking for v1.4a (if they must have the latest standard).
In your example of standard HDMI vs high speed HDMI - that kindof proves my point - there's no such think as high speed SCART is there?! People won't be looking for 'high speed' HDMI for their PS3, they'll expect any cable to manage it. I know I have one that causes jumping.