Digital Foundry vs. HDMI video

By Richard Leadbetter Published 8 January, 2011

£1.50 vs. £100 cable, and PS3/360 outputs put to the test.

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This one should be a no-brainer right? Everyone knows that HDMI is a digitally lossless form of transmitting audio and video, so it stands to reason that the cables - no matter how cheap or expensive - should either work or not work. There is no middle ground here.

But has anyone ever actually tested this, by directly capturing the traffic of the HDMI port using multiple cables of varying quality? Is there any actual need for this £655 HDMI cable?

Similarly, as the HDMI format is a purely digital form of transmitting the AV signals, the picture you get should be completely identical to the contents of the console's framebuffer, right? Well, that's something we'll be looking at later on in this feature - whether the promise of a digitally pristine video output is actually realised in the HDMI ports of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

First up: a bit of history. Just before Christmas, we retweeted this HDMI Truth Bomb "fact sheet" on the Digital Foundry Twitter feed, which led to a curious exchange with The Official PlayStation Magazine's Editor-in-Chief Tim Clark on how their tests seemed to bring up differences in performance of the cables used. A difference in colour depth, perhaps? The HDMI standard does support different colour formats (x.v deep colour, YPrPb 4:2:2, YPrPb 4:4:4, 24-bit RGB) but their test game, Killzone 2 - like all games we're aware of - is RGB only, so we were left a bit puzzled.

Human perception is a funny old thing. As the technology behind our gaming gets ever more complex, so does the make-up of the sound and the images being beamed to our senses. A native 720p console game running at 30FPS is pumping 28,648,000 pixels per second towards our eyes. Uncompressed 7.1 audio consists of 384,000 different samples of sound transmitted in the same period of time (yes, even the .1 channel gets full 48000Hz output just like the other seven channels - we checked with Sony).

It's all insanely cool, of course, but comparisons along the lines of using one screen with two different cables won't really work. Two identical screens, calibrated in precisely the same way, running side by side... Maybe that would be enlightening, but it's still somewhat unscientific. Human perception is obviously important, but it can't be measured or quantified.

cable-amazon
cable-monster
cable-microsoft
cable-sony

Four HDMI cables are amassed for testing: a £1.50 generic cable (top-left) faces off against a Monster cable that costs up to £100 (top-right). In between these extremes are the official Microsoft lead we got with our Xbox 360 Elite (bottom-left) and last but definitely not least, the Sony offering (bottom-right). Photography: Oz Levy.

Frame-rate analysis was one of our answers to the frailties of human perception - a bit of science to give us accurate, fool-proof data on the performance level of the games we play. So can the same thing be done to test the throughput of HDMI cables? Well, the principles of frame-rate testing - analysis of HDMI data - allows us to do exactly that. All we need to do is capture the exact same video output using a range of HDMI cables and use something like a basic MD5 hash checksum to make sure that the image is completely the same.

Our solution? Take a lossless 24-bit RGB screenshot of a 1080p game (Gran Turismo 5 is the obvious choice), then run it through the PlayStation 3's photo viewer. We used our stalwart "fat" 60GB NTSC launch model for reasons that will become clear later.

Initially we tried just pausing the game, in the hope that this would give us the same consistent still image. However, even though pause is in effect, the renderer is still running and producing microscopically different frames: invisible to the human eye, but not to our testing tools - so there is no chance of our mathematically precise checksums working out. XMB photo viewer it is.

But what HDMI cables should we test? Pre-Christmas we bought in a couple of sub-£1.50 cheapo leads from Amazon. The Digital Foundry coffers couldn't quite extend to spending £655 on an HDMI cable, let alone let alone three grand on the 5m version, but we did snaffle a Monster 1000HD 2m cable, which seems to cost anything up to £72 or even £100 (!!) depending on just how crap you are at using Google.

Acting as a bridge between the cheapo cable and the monstrously expensive one, we dropped in the official Microsoft 360 lead - £29.99 with audio dongle - and Sony's equivalent PS3 offering, which will set you back about £18 from numerous sources.

The cheapo Amazon cable certainly feels thinner and of a significantly lower quality than the others, while the Monster cable has some lovely plugs and a reassuring level of thickness and weight to it. The Microsoft product is, well, grey... but otherwise unremarkable. All of these are gold-plated, but Sony hasn't bothered with this for its official cable - and any engineer worth their salt will tell you that the advantages of gold-plating are dubious to begin with and pretty much completely pointless on a digital lead like this. There's a refreshing sense of functionality about the official Sony cable - yes, it's over-priced at £18, but at least it's 3m long, whereas 1.8m or 2m is more often the norm.

Onto the testing: the PlayStation 3 was set to output the same still image and it was duly captured at full 24-bit RGB precision at full 1080p via our TrueHD capture card. The process was repeated with each cable. Random frames from the captured streams were dumped, and hashed using freeware tool HashCalc. Just to be clear here, the XMB Photo Viewer is still outputting 1080p at 60 frames per second (with an uncompressed audio stream) - effectively the maximum throughput you will require for gaming using these cables.

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Comments (182) Latest comment 1 year ago

Comments for this article are now closed, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • RKOwned #1 1 year ago

    Is there anyway to get the games to not looks so washed out on my PS3? My TV cant do RGB full correctly. It crushes blacks and I lose detail in dark areas.
    Edited by RKOwned at 08/01/11 @ 07:57

  • nuanimal #2 1 year ago

    Best DF article I've read in ages. For consumers!

    Nice one :o)

  • Avaloner #3 1 year ago

    Very informative. Thanks!

  • foxmulder55 #4 1 year ago

    top stuff , gem of an article i can rest at ease with my ten euro cables :)

  • handsonhips101 #5 1 year ago

    @rkowned

    Go to display settings on the ps3 and turn the hdmi output range to full from limited. Works a treat. Don't know why its not set to this as standard?

  • old_skool #6 1 year ago

    Thanks DF, nice to know the facts from the marketing nonsense.

  • Hastur #7 1 year ago

    Due to the low profit margins on hardware, retailers often use overpriced peripherals as a means to increase their income. Even if you won't notice the difference, they would gladly sell you a £50 cable. I have always used the cheapest no-brand hdmi cables I could get my hands on.

  • scorpius45 #8 1 year ago

    @RKOwned

    If your TV is calibrated correctly the PS3 won't look washed out, so my suggestion would be buy yourself a calibration blu ray and calibrate you tv correctly.

  • LHH #9 1 year ago

    Finally an article explaining what I always knew. I bet some people still deny it though and say their expensive monster cable gives a better image

  • gunark #10 1 year ago

    For years What Hi Fi have dined off of this bollocks of performance cableling, and granted with analogue signals and power conditioning they can have a point. But describing £100+ dvi / coax / optical / hdmi leads of improved colour / image sharpness / wider sound stage / etc is frankly offensive crap of the highest order. This very argument has been debated at amusing length on Avforums for years but still do you get mugs buying £50 monsters hdmi cables at Currys with their amazing new LED technology tvs.

    For those people I have some ultra titanium screened network cabling at £100 /m for extra speed from your broadband and gold aerials for your routers for amazing wifi.

  • lockload #11 1 year ago

    I think officially HDMI works ober 5m if you go longer thats when a higher quality cable is required
    Edited by lockload at 08/01/11 @ 08:54

  • Vice.Destroyer #12 1 year ago

    I wish I had read this article before I bought my new Panasonic. I bought a HDMI cable with it. Originally £50, but reduced to £30 by the salesman, who said he'd give me a good bargain. He saw me coming, that sheister.

    I am also glad for that image, representing poor video output from a HDMI cable on page 2. I have seen that green line from time to time on my games, but always assumed it is my Xbox behaving strangely, or possibly being about to die. Never for a second did I imagine that it would be my £30 (RRP£50) HDMI Cable, which the kind salesman from Curry squeezed into my hand.

  • KDR_11k #13 1 year ago

    Interesting, I didn't know that the 360 outputs lower color depths by default. Still, changing it won't make the banding go away, 16.7M colors my ass, Samsung!

  • paul_shs #14 1 year ago

    i am a sky installer and the amount of customers that buy these expensive leads is amazing. Its not just old people either who get sucked in by this. The other thing that currys/dixons make money on is them monster surge protector extension socket thing. £100 for a 7 way surge protector.

  • ectotropic #15 1 year ago

    Nice article - have waited a long time for something like this (i.e. a scientific test of digital cables)! Thanks DF!

    Any chance of doing tests with other modes? (Like 3D & deep colour?) Be interested to know if the increased bandwidth requirements make any difference.

    FWIW - I believe the use of gold on connectors is more to do with chemistry than electronics: passing a current between two different metals (e.g. at a connector) can cause corrosion - gold is highly stable and pretty much chemically neutral which reduces this (effectively removing the issue). Or something like that - my memory is not so good, but to the best of my recollection the point is that gold connectors are supposed to be longer lived and avoid corroding equipment.

  • JohnnyWashnGo #16 1 year ago

    Great article - hopefully this will save some people some money.
    I really hate companies that rip people off like this - more so salepeople who haven't got a clue recommend expensive cables that are no better than cheaper ones.

    As an aside, do people still use MD5 for checksums?
    In this case it doesn't really matter but for anything important I thought SHA256 was the way to go?

  • old_skool #17 1 year ago

    @lockload

    I'm not sure what the max cable length is for HDMI but I have a ten metre cable connected between my TV and PS3 and it works fine, and it's a cheap cable
    Edited by old_skool at 08/01/11 @ 09:42

  • Emmit_Assassin #18 1 year ago

    Just what I always thought! Cheers guys!! Its amazing how much consumers are ripped off by companies preying on people that haven't got a clue about HD, or they just make it all so complicated that we all just go, "Oh, just give me whatever will work!"

  • CaptainQuint #19 1 year ago

    Good article, thanks.

    Use HDMI on my PS3 but I'm still going through VGA on my Xbox Elite. I've tried it with HDMI, but I was convinced the image seemed better on VGA so I stuck with it.

    It would've been nice to get confirmation on that, but never mind.

  • mirjamlover #20 1 year ago

    seems to be some confusion here (handsonhips101) about the PS3 settings.your output should be always be set to 'LIMITED' and NOT 'FULL RGB'.

    whilst some new displays can output these signals there are currently NO games or blurays that use the format (also known as 'deepcolor') so it's a waste of time. i believe only the XMB and the folding home app use it at present. by setting your PS3 to 'FULL RGB' you're actually limiting the output and the blacks will be crushed and the picture will look too dark.

    as scorpius45 mentioned, if the display is correctly calibrated the picture will look great and not washed out etc.

  • Caimbeul #21 1 year ago

    i always knew cheaper cables were fine. Pissed off a few Curry's shop staff when the standard first came out and they were trying to sell a stupidly expensive HDMI cables to people with no idea. I chirped in and explained why they are not worth it. hehehe

    @ scorpius45 - i agree about the (i prusume you are referring to Blu-Ray?) calibration disc for most people but for a proper calibration you need to buy special toolsand know what you are doing + be willing to risk your warranty and TV or hire a specialist to come and calibrate your TV from the service menu. but this however is expensive and generally good results can be achieved with the Blu-Ray calibration discs priced at about £10 - £15. Heck if you have not done any adjustments to your TV and dont want to pay out for a disc, see if you have a DVD that ids THX certified (star wars is a good example) and use this.

    General advice would be to start by turning the sets backlight down, reducing sharpness to zero or a low setting and if your set supports it - enable 1:1 pixel mapping (named various thing by deifferent manufacturers) this is the most important thing to do for clarity. Otherwise what is happening is your TV is not displaying exactly everything that the source is sending to it and you will be missing some picture and loosing clarity and fine detail. It is all down to personal preference at the end of the day (witht the exception of the 1:1 pixel mapping) but the point of calibrating is to view the image as the creator intended, whether this be film, television or game. It will likely seem like the image is a little too dark compared to the glaring vivid and vomit inducing settings that the TV comes out of the box with.

    A good example of 1:1 pixel mapping or lack of for those that have an HD television source is BBC HD and other Channel logo's in general. On many sets i have seen the logo is very much in the top left corner without much space around , where as with 1:1 mapping enabled it has more room around it and you are getting more image on the screen in finer detail.

    Head over to http://www.avforums.com/forums/index.php for more info than i can be bothered to post here and community support for your particular TV - very helpful bunch there on the whole and people often take images to show the differences of things like 1:1 pixel mapping.

    One further word of advice for AV in general. Don't pay any attention to a word printed by What Hi-Fi magazine as it is all bollocks and often manufacturer sponsored rubbish they spout.

    @ KDR_11k - this banding you refer to may be down to the panel type used in your set. AVforums can clarify for you.

    Good article!

  • Roarster #22 1 year ago

    Just an extra point on the shielding on cheap HDMI cables, I actually had problems with the HDMI signal going from my HTPC interfering with my freeview signal and making it unwatchable. Looking around the internet I"m not the only person with this problem, apparently HDMI cables use similar frequencies to tv cables and cause interference.

    MInd you, I'm not sure if a more expensive cable would prevent this, I just wrapped my £3 cable in tinfoil and all was good.

  • Roarster #23 1 year ago

    Actually thinking about this a bit more, is this even a good test? If HDMI is all or nothing then the difference is going to come when the signal fails. It would be more interesting to see if the cheaper cable fails more often and, presumably, loses more frames.

  • FutureDave #24 1 year ago

    @RKOwned

    If your TV is crushing blacks in Full RGB mode, switch to limited. That's why it's there. Don't be put off by the 'limited' word, you'll get a great picture with detail in the blacks. I have to use limited RGB on my 50" plasma. It took me ages to figure out why my blacks were so crushed until I read up on what the PS3 settings actually did.

    Same goes for Xbox users. You may want to check your colour space settings if your picture seems too dark with lost shadow detail. Try switching from RGB to YCbCr709.

  • mukki #25 1 year ago

    Nice article, thanks
    Would be interesting to read if it is the same with TOSLINK cables too

  • mirjamlover #26 1 year ago

    everybody needs to use 'LIMITED' as the games and blurays are made that way. 'FULL RGB'/deepcolor' is not yet widely used even if your display can output it.

  • the_sas_man #27 1 year ago

    *returns his £655 HDMI cable*

  • witchdrash #28 1 year ago

    The annoying thing is, that even though people like yourselves have done the work and proven this time and time again the people who get ripped off by this are the people who go in to places like Currys and just buy a tv, don't fully understand and are spanked for £100 by the salesman for a cable, when the £3 one sat next to it, for their purposes, really is as good. People who read these sort of articles generally wont be taken for a ride as they are educating themselves before purchasing complex technology.
    Edited by witchdrash at 08/01/11 @ 10:38

  • snick #29 1 year ago

    I had a £2 HDMI cable for my HTPC which kept dropping the signal... sadly the cable was the last thing I checked so I had rebuilt everything, changed video cards, cursed quite heavily, before buying a £10 HDMI cable which hasn't ever had the same problem. Plus the video quality is exactly the same as far as I can see.

    Perhaps there was something in the build quality of the cheaper cable which caused the failure, but there was no way I was going to follow the guy from Currys £75 cable advice.

  • lesalanos #30 1 year ago

    Excellent article which completely validates my cheapskate decision to buy that cable for £1.50 a while back

  • Fake_Blood #31 1 year ago

    Interesting, but it's all about bandwidth, so should have tested hdmi 1.4 3D on a few long cables.

  • Cheapshot #32 1 year ago

    Great! I use an Xbox 360 cable for me PS3 (messed up I know) and my games look fantastic but there was always an itching feeling that those 1 month salary HDMI cables were somehow a lot better. Thanks for clearing that up, phew!

  • urban #33 1 year ago

    DF finally does something actually useful.

  • Der_tolle_Emil #34 1 year ago

    Very good article. I always said that with digital signals it either works or it doesn't. If the image gets through it is exactly the same regardless of what cable you use. I have to admit though with so many discussions I sometimes started to doubt if I was right.

    Hopefully this will stop a few more people from getting ripped off in shops. Of course build quality has its price - I killed one HDMI cable once when I was trying to unplug it and was left with the cable in my hand and the rest of the plug in my receiver - but in no way will there ever be a reason to pay so much money for cables.

  • mashk #35 1 year ago

    Great stuff. The amount of arguments I've got into with people who think that there is a difference between expensive and cheap HDMI cables.

  • Shadders #36 1 year ago

    PRO DG's Target Manager can't capture images straight from the disc anyway, you'd have to be running a build through Target Manager itself.

    Other than that, great article! :D

  • makariel #37 1 year ago

    Hehehe, when I was looking for a HDMI cable for my PS3 that guy from the local electronics chain (BCC, as a warning if you're hanging around in the NL) wanted to sell me a 150€ cable. He told me the whole shebang about the high quality and gold contacts and how the magic fairydust in the 150€ cable makes the electrons feel more at ease when travelling along the wire. Since I'm an electrical engineer, I of course stated that what he tells me is BS. He got angry at me and started to yell. I went to a shop across the street for buying a HDMI cable for less than 10€ and it works like a charm. I haven't set foot into the shop with the yelling staff again.
    Edited by makariel at 08/01/11 @ 11:24

  • butler` #38 1 year ago

    I can't believe you actually had to test this.

    If you got a gold plated USB cable would it make your mouse/camera/keyboard better quality?-.-

  • trevd72 #39 1 year ago

    i laugh in the face of idiots who brag about how much their (expensive) cable cost - i love it!!!

  • StooMonster #40 1 year ago

    For short cables picture quality (i.e. the digital data) should be identical regardless of the cables.

    For longer cables, such as one might use for a projector, you do get a difference in performance, but this is not seen in "better" or "worse" picture quality rather it is seen in 'sparklies' which are data transmission errors. One spec of HDMI cable might get you to 10m or 15m with sparklies and not to 20m, whereas a more expensive spec might get to you 15m or 20m with 'sparklies'. Of course one could buy an HDMI repeater and have two shorter cables, but sometimes that's not convenient if one needs to run long HDMI through nooks and crannies of house's construction in an AV install.

  • BlinkeredAxis #41 1 year ago

    On a similar topic, I found that Assasins Creed 1 behaved differently between HDMI and VGA (on XBOX360)

    VGA cable - better picture with better anti aliasing (looked nice and smooth)

    HDMI cable - slightly worse picture, but some very nice moving shadows caused by clouds moving over the sun started to appear. These were absent with VGA for some reason. DF - could you do a fanatastially expensive full study for me?

    Thanks lol

    I've stuck to VGA for now. To be honest though, the difference is small.

  • StooMonster #42 1 year ago

    Oops, apparently I am old skool and call them 'sparklies', apparently this is an analogue only term and in the digital space (e.g. for DVI or HDMI transmission errors) they are called 'sparkles'. :)

  • SeesThroughAll #43 1 year ago

    THIS is the kind of article DF should have written a long time ago.

    Although common sense dictates that a 60 euro HDMI is not going to do a better job than a cheap one, it is about time someone clearly explained it how it really is!

    Thank you for an article that will benefit consumers!

  • jonsaan #44 1 year ago

    I'm staggered that people actually fell for this bollocks in the first place frankly.

  • StooMonster #45 1 year ago

    DigitalFoundry: where the signal was affected, the corrupt data is fairly easy to see [green line in picture]

    Vice.Destroyer: I have seen that green line from time to time on my games

    StooMonster: HDMI sparkles

    Does anyone know why HDMI errors are always green?

    Same as with DVI and where you get sparkles on long runs, or use that awful and expensive MiniDisplayLink to Dual-DVI Link from Apple that puts green sparkles all over 30-inch monitors. They are all green -- rarely seen blue or red sparkles -- why is that?

  • kobashi #46 1 year ago

    Great article and I am gonna send the link to my friend who spent £50 on a HDMI Lead. Been telling him for ages he was ripped off and a cheap lead does the same job.

  • IneptPercy #47 1 year ago

    Been telling friends and family this for a long time now and been buying £1.50 hdmi cables for them al on ebay from time to time.

    Looks behind computer and smiles at cheap HDMI and DVI cables.

  • gunark #48 1 year ago

    What Hi Fi are even doing a sound test with £50 award winning USB cables this month, hearing a smoother sound, better space and tighter timing. ITS AN OVERPRICED USB CABLE YOU COCKTRACTORS, THEY ALL WORK THE SAME WAY!

  • frostcircus #49 1 year ago

    I love you Eurogamer. This is my haven. Yes I'm fucking drunk but I'm allowed one drunk post (check the rules, this is so) and I choose to use it on this article about HDMI cables and yes I love Eurogamer because you apply a salve to my tortured soul and balls

    edit: so accustomed to Minecraft am I that I can play it even when off my delicious perfectly-formed tits. What does this tell you about Notch and his soul and balls? NOTHING AT ALL

    edit edit: I apologise from the heart of my bottom
    Edited by frostcircus at 08/01/11 @ 12:40

  • frostcircus #50 1 year ago

    My pricking HDMI cable has a tendency to either work flawlessly or cut out all together. This may be entirely my fault, though; I may have bent it in a brutal manner and raped its soul. For all I know it could have been a perfect pure god-fearing wonderful cable until I got my intercourse-smeared hands upon its loveliness and destroyed its innocence die in a waterfall

    edit: please don't ban me for violating the one-drunk-post rule I beg of you

    edit edit: It appears that inebriation has done nothing to impede the progress of my surreptitious recreation of E1L1 of Wolfenstein 3-D underneath me and my brother's Minecraft city. If nothing else this proves the sheer artlessness of the undertaking
    Edited by frostcircus at 08/01/11 @ 12:45

  • RobTheBuilder #51 1 year ago

    As Hastur says, retailers make HUGE margins on accessories. Many will set targets on accessories for their salespeople because often the margin on a £30 cable will be the same as the £400 TV you are buying!

    Good to see it from a reliable source that cheap ones aren't as bad as you might think.

  • Stop-gap #52 1 year ago

    I just replaced a £20 gamestation cable with a £1.25 amazon one. The expensive one had been complete crap all along and finally fell apart in my hands after about 6 months, and I'm glad to see my suspicions confirmed that fancy cabling means nothing when it comes to HDMI.

  • FortysixterUK #53 1 year ago

    Now thats a good article, I've been suspicious of the cost differences between all kinds of AV leads over the years, and this test on the HDMI cable has surely dropped a bomb on the suppliers who try to rip us off.

  • albinas #54 1 year ago

    So after all this fanboy fights it's finally clear that ps3 outputs correct gamma. Sorry if I missed it in previous articles.
    And on a subject, maybe higher priced cables have better protection of interference?

  • TitianWarrior #55 1 year ago

    "What Hi Fi are even doing a sound test with £50 award winning USB cables this month, hearing a smoother sound, better space and tighter timing. ITS AN OVERPRICED USB CABLE YOU COCKTRACTORS, THEY ALL WORK THE SAME WAY! "

    I think you'll find that if you are DJing with a laptop eg.Traktor, using a DJ specific usb cable (better shielding etc.) will reduce or eliminate dropouts from an external DJ soundcard. £50 is way too much though DJTechTools do a great one for $15.

  • penhalion #56 1 year ago

    We now get to officially laugh at anyone with more money than sense who actually goes out any buys a 665 quid hdmi cable :)

  • youhavenomail #57 1 year ago

    MY experience of HDMI cables is that they're not all the same. I've had a cheap cable that made the colours seem less vibrant, but it doesn't seem to be down to price because I've had a different cable for the same price that was perfect. Even the poorer of the two wasn't exactly awful but the difference was apparent to the naked eye.

    And what about the HDMI 1.4 cables with Ethernet that I've seen on the market? What are they all about?

  • Sniper_007 #58 1 year ago

    Great article, as many have said I would love a follow up article comparing performance under a full 1080p 3D load but still a very informative read. And one I'm looking forward to using as evidence next time anyone mentions the benefits of 'rip off' cables in the future :)

  • espibara #59 1 year ago

    Could have done with a better summary of teh findings

  • rodpad #60 1 year ago

    [link url=http://community.whathifi.com/forums/t/556188.aspx
    ]http://community.whathifi.com/forums/t/5...[/link]

    Hopefully a sensible conversation will ensue.

  • b00n #61 1 year ago

    Great article! Could you guys manage to do something similar for audio cables? The variation in pricing there is ridiculous as well, and would be very interesting to know if it's worth the extra cost, specifically for gaming in surround.

  • fiery_jackass #62 1 year ago

    really good article, thank you (although Microsoft is a single entity, not a plural, so you need to fiddle your verb forms a bit)

  • Nozzinja #63 1 year ago

    DF more or less confirmed my hunch all along.

    /is happy with his £5 10m cable(s)

  • BlinkeredAxis #64 1 year ago

    EG should give FrostCircus a job, he's really funny.

  • Tallon4 #65 1 year ago

    Great read ! But I'm confused....

    The best settings for the PS3 are 'RGB limited' and the best settings for the 360 are:
    - YCbCr709 and
    - Colour Space: Expanded?


  • SvennoJ #66 1 year ago

    RGB full on ps3 is only useful for watching pictures on a pc monitor or a set that supports HDMI expanded color range.
    RGB limited outputs colors in 15-240 range, which is the same what all movies use and what every tv set expects. Switching to full has the same effect as increasing the contrast setting when you should be lowering the brightness. Now you won't see colors 0-15 and 240-255 on a tv. Loosing dark details and causing white out (extra bloom) Just leave it to limited and adjust brightness and contrast on your tv.

    Same with xbox 360. Set the color space to YCbCr709 when using a tv. The reference level setting (normal, intermediate, expanded) has no effect when using YCbCr709 and the output will be in the correct 15-240 range.

    The best thing you can do for the 360 for 1080p sets is to set the console to 720p output. Most tvs do a far better job at upscaling to a 1080p display then the 360. You will get a bit of overscan since the tv doesn't do a dot by dot conversion but the result is far clearer (less blurry) then by using the 360s 1080p output. The ps3 already outputs 720p games in 720p so has no issue there.
    Edited by SvennoJ at 08/01/11 @ 15:08

  • thesonglessbird #67 1 year ago

    Bought a new TV last week and the first thing the sales guy did was hand me some expensive HDMI cables. ERRR, no thanks mate. I already have a load and I'm not paying £40 for yours!

  • Gastrian #68 1 year ago

    Post deleted at 17:56:43 13-04-2012

  • Tallon4 #69 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: thanks! Will give it a try ! Never considered setting the 360 on 720P on my 1080P set.
    Tried it once....but the menu in 1080P looker sharper to my eyes

  • Badassbab #70 1 year ago

    Excellent article. Now I know the cheapest HDMI cable will do. Nice!

  • Badassbab #71 1 year ago

    SvennoJ

    Disagree with you. I set my PS3 and 360 to max everything and then change the settings on my TV. The dedicated 360 upscaler is very good, better than cheapo TV upscalers and PS3 GPU based upscaler. Just compare Dead Space 2 on PS3 and 360, the PS3 upscales the game to 1080p but it looks more washed out next to the 360 upscaled 1080p. But when the PS3 version is set to 720p it looks more like the 360 version since the game is native 720p.

  • jamhead #72 1 year ago

    This article made my day. I work in a very tech-savvy office and yet some people there still insist that paying for an expensive cable is worthwhile. I will look forward to rubbing all their noses in this article on Monday! Seriously - more like this please!

  • petrolgirls #73 1 year ago

    I work in post-production and tested this some time ago - we used a difference key to check our results - far more elegant.

    @Mirjamlover - don't give advice so vocally when you don't know what you're talking about. Deep colour refers to a 12-bit signal via HDMI - however this has nothing to do with expanded/limited colour range - they refer to 8-bit images, expanded or full uses all 8bits per channel ie 0-255, limited uses 16-235. Broadcast images are limited but games and bluray can use the full range. Most modern TVs can modify their inputs to take this into account.

  • mirjamlover #74 1 year ago

    sorry petrolgirls for the confusion about the deepcolor thing, my bad!!

    but....whilst games and blurays can use the full rgb signal, they don't at present!! that was my point!

    wasn't trying to preach as i used to have my settings on full (wrong) until told otherwise. was just trying to help other PS3 owners like myself.

  • Vverdenfell #75 1 year ago

    Just some info for some folks; RGB Full is NOT the same as "deep color".

    Movies are best watched in RGB Limited(16-235) and PS3-games are best
    played in RGB Full(0-255) if your TV supports it. Games are native in RGB 0-255
    and movies are native in 16-235(below 16 is Blacker than black and above 235 is
    Whiter than white).

    Edit: Guess I was too slow on explaining that.. :)
    Edited by Vverdenfell at 08/01/11 @ 16:20

  • albinas #76 1 year ago

    @mirjamlover: it's your display that supports or does not support full range, not the games.

  • vadimur #77 1 year ago

    My xbox is the older version without HDMI output & I have got the official component & VGA cables plugged into my LCD tv. I found that the component output is more colorful while the vga one is less colourful, why is that so? Strangely, i can't adjust the settings thro my TV for the vga input while i can for the component input.

  • mirjamlover #78 1 year ago

    happy to be corrected!! however i seem i was at least right about the blurays!! :(

    confused tho, are we really supposed to go into the settings menu and change them when watching movies and games? even if your display can output 'full', the PS3 will crush the blacks on the blurays if that's set to 'full'

  • ChocNut #79 1 year ago

    I always knew that you get the signal or you don't with digital but still have one minor concern that the article didn't address (possibly because it's irrelevant).

    What about lag?

  • Eraserhead #80 1 year ago

    Okay, ignore me, looks like I should research things more before trying to talk about them!
    Edited by Eraserhead at 08/01/11 @ 17:39

  • StooMonster #81 1 year ago

    vadimur: I found that the component output is more colorful while the vga one is less colourful, why is that so?

    The component is in the YPbPr colourspace whereas VGA is in the RGB colourspace, although YPbPr ("component video";) was developed to save bandwidth over RGB the results output from the Xbox 360 should be the same.

    Any difference is likely caused by the processing of your display which will have a different set of default settings for each input, however it should be simple to adjust them to be identical.

  • StooMonster #82 1 year ago

    Eraserhead

    VGA and component are both analogue.

    VGA actually requires higher bandwidth than component, component was developed as a lower bandwidth alternative to VGA.

    VGA it contains entire 0-255 colour range for each element (full range), whereas component analogue is 16-235 range (video range or normal range) -- there's something called 'whiter than white' and 'blacker than black' but that's another point.

    "Component splits the signal into separate RGB (hence the name)" is wrong, that's what VGA does having separate Red, Green, and Blue elements; component splits the video into Luminance, difference between blue and luma, and difference between red and luma.

    "VGA is really a crappy last choice for modern displays, basically" is not true, in fact for computer output it's vastly superior to component, and for video games it's probably better (better colour resolution for one thing) but for video (e.g. DVD or Blu-ray) then component is the way to go.

  • FuzzyDuck #83 1 year ago

    @ectotropic

    Methinks you're referring to galvanic corrosion; where two metals that are in electrical contact experience preferential corrosion of the more anodic metal. While gold is less reactive than silver, silver is still cathodic to the point that it's perfectly acceptable to use in electrical components and that the difference between itself and gold is small enough to not undergo galvanic corrosion, even after prolonged electrical contact between the two.

    /notes that it's been some time since chemistry was studied, can't remember exact terms and whatnot.

    Tip-top article DF, and one that proves that i was right to go with the 5 euro HDMI lead that's worked perfectly for the 2+ years that i've been using it.
    Edited by FuzzyDuck at 08/01/11 @ 17:14

  • Dangher #84 1 year ago

    @ectotropic

    "Any chance of doing tests with other modes? (Like 3D & deep colour?) Be interested to know if the increased bandwidth requirements make any difference."

    I don't think they will. Just as an example - a standard UTP cable wired using the 568-B can trasfer at 1 Gigabit duplex over 100 meters. That is over 80 Megabytes of data per second.So, no - I don't think it will make any difference in the long run. A point in fact - 120 MB at 30 fps is 4 MB per frame including sound. Per FRAME. That is close to DOUBLE the full HD resolution. Coming back to the point - the HDMI cable has what, 14, 16 leads? You can do the math yourself.

    D.

  • EVERYGAMER #85 1 year ago

    I would like to say what a great article. Its wonderful to now have something to refer people to. In my job at GAME the amount of times "but its gold plated" or "its the official lead" I've had people say confusion on their faces when I tell them to just get the cheapest HDMI you can cause they are all the same. I swear most of them thought I was mad :-(
    Edited by EVERYGAMER at 08/01/11 @ 18:07

  • themanfromdelmonte #86 1 year ago

    scorplus45 "@ RKOwned

    If your TV is calibrated correctly the PS3 won't look washed out, so my suggestion would be buy yourself a calibration blu ray and calibrate you tv correctly.

    There's a THX calibration utility on the Star Wars DVDs, hidden away in the languages menu iirc. If you've already got these or can borrow them, that'll save you some cash.

  • Metalartin #87 1 year ago

    As a 360 gamer who uses a monitor I'm a little confused about what to set it at but I'm geussing the safest bet would be:

    Colourspace: "Source" (will change from RGB to YPbPr depending on the content... if YPbPr is better for some games or movies it should detect it and switch from RGB automatically, I'm still wondering whether to leave it set at RGB though just incase its not accurate)
    Reference Level: "Extended"

    Edit: Btw I only paid £12.99 for the official MS HDMI cable off Amazon :) , needed the optical out anyway.
    Edited by Metalartin at 08/01/11 @ 18:49

  • drxym #88 1 year ago

    I think it's fairly obvious digital cables either work or they don't. There is no "richer" sound or picture from using an expensive cable. The odd part is anyone would think any different. Even the most deluded, ardent audiophile probably owns a computer filled with generic SATA, eSATA, DVI-D, USB etc. cables. I wonder if they think their programs are washed or distorted because of it.

    That's not to say all HDMI cables are reliable. Cables can be deficient or faulty. Cables also need to meet the specs and if (for example) you try using an HDMI 1.2 cable with 1080p you might find the shielding inadequate to cope with the higher bandwidth.

  • mousearmyone #89 1 year ago

    Was reading up about HDMI cables just before Christmas and found this article very interesting. http://www.audioholics.com/education/cab...

  • JamieR #90 1 year ago

    I still use all hd cables for the 360 that came with one with all the colours and that works fine for me i had to buy a hd cable for the ps3 >.< i just got a cheap one but that works fine for me too. the wii i use the one that came with too wii dont look so good on my tv ill have to get a good one for it.

  • vadimur #91 1 year ago

    StooMonster

    Thanks. I guess it must be my TV's factory preset settings. Visual settings are grey out, i can't adjust at all, tat's why i'm puzzled.

  • vadimur #92 1 year ago

    Btw, my xbox just died again. F@%#%$^%$^%*&^(*&()*)(*_)(^&%%$@$@

  • sonsonate #93 1 year ago

    Excellent article! You all are like the Anandtech of Gaming!

  • emhaslam92 #94 1 year ago

    Good article. Unfortunately shops still abuse the public's lack of knowledge. The other day currys (iirc) conned my grandparent into buying a £50 hdmi cable with his new tv. Disgraceful.

  • SvennoJ #95 1 year ago

    @Badassbab: I didn't know Dead space 2 upscales on ps3. I compared the Mass Effect 2 demo, on the 360 with 720p it looked the same as on the ps3, with the 360 on 1080p it looked a lot more blurry. That was on a 2500 dollar 1080p lcd projector, not surprising that has a better upscaler then a 300 dollar console.
    I guess I'll have to switch the ps3 to 720p mode for Dead space 2 then. Hopefully we'll get rid of all this upscaling nonsense next gen.

  • chaywa #96 1 year ago

    Yes but what this article fails to establish is the difference in HDMI quality relating to the length of the cable itself. Decent companies who make HDMI cables over 8 metres or so long will include active cables (active electronics built into cables that boost and extend the cable’s signal), repeaters, amplifiers as well as CAT5/6 and fibre solutions in order to ensure that the signal quality does not deteriorate significantly.

    Admittedly this won't affect many household users but the article seems to paint all cheap HDMI cables as the same as more expensive ones, which simply isn't true over long distant transmissions.

  • Bobbus74 #97 1 year ago

    This test was already performed over a year ago on The Gadget Show (a UK based Tech show for those unaware) and they basically said the same thing eg it doesn't matter how much you spend on your HDMI cable as you'll get near identical results.

  • Dangher #98 1 year ago

    @sonsonate

    " You all are like the Anandtech of Gaming! "

    Erm... Not really. Anandtech is mostly Apple these days... Shame really.

  • man.the.king #99 1 year ago

    I could not believe that there are actually HDMI cables which cost nearly 3000, in GBP no less!

    I used to buy Monster cables but after reading this article, I'll have to rethink my strategy while buying such A/V cables in the future.

    Thanks DF!

  • TONYgr #100 1 year ago

    Fantastic article!!!

  • man.the.king #101 1 year ago

    @StooMonster

    "They are all green -- rarely seen blue or red sparkles -- why is that? "

    Maybe it's because blue/red artifact is harder to notice as in most normal images greens are not as prominent as blues & reds?

    Don't really know - just guessing.
    Edited by man.the.king at 08/01/11 @ 22:28

  • SvennoJ #102 1 year ago

    @man.the.king
    I guess it's because of the nature of the YCbCr color space
    Y′ is the luma component and CB and CR are the blue-difference and red-difference chroma components.
    I guess when it screws up you're left with the luma component which is displayed as green.

  • hesido #103 1 year ago

    Only very bad quality cables seem to affect the performance (causing digital artefacts.)

    Some monster cables even claim to be "faster" for higher bandwith standards. Is there currentl such an HDMI standard that requires higher bandwith, and sturdier cables for the higher information frequency??? (1080p 3d with lossless audio and all those bollocks going through one cable)

  • El_MUERkO #104 1 year ago

    Glad to see my suspicions proven correct!

    I buy my cables from Neet: [link url=http://www.neetcables.com/
    ]http://www.neetcables.com/
    [/link]

    They're cheap, high quality and have great customer support.

  • TaniumZX #105 1 year ago

    My HDMI leads cost me under a tenner each off amazon or somewhere, picture is spot on.

  • chrisola #106 1 year ago

    good article -- and the comments about the HDMI settings for PS3 have helped me out a treat!

    My 360 is connected by VGA -- when i got back into gaming i spent ages calibrating my TV using a guide and reference images from AVForums -- it's been set to a 1:1 mapping and looks grate for dvds and games...i always struggled with the PS3 for some reason (i think i have it connected using my Microsoft HDMI cable!) and it was the pesky colour settings.

  • Orionsaint #107 1 year ago

    I have a question. I'm using a low priced generic HDMI cable about 6ft long on my PS3. It's always given me a solid picture. I'm using a Sharp Aquos 1080p HDTV. So recently I bought Gran Turismo 5 and I noticed that whenever I raced in weather. These pixelated jaggies appear. Does anyone else see this or is it just me? Any suggestions on how to fix it? I recorded it for evidence and uploaded it to Youtube.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7AFvgNSSzI

  • frostcircus #108 1 year ago

    I feel that my drunk posts of yesternight deserve some form of epilogue

  • StooMonster #109 1 year ago

    @man.the.king

    Nah, if you get them on a black screen then you would be able to easily see any other colour. Also, red is the colour that human eye notices above all others, so you would see red rather than green.

    You can see from the DF screenshot that it's a green line.

    @ SvennoJ

    DVI is RGB colourspace and that has green sparkles too, but that was a good guess.

    I am going to email a mate who designs HDMI and other video processing chips for optical disc players / displays / projectors and ask him. :)

  • Acrid #110 1 year ago

    Still going strong with my free cable from virgin media

  • Lord_Chaos #111 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: RGB full on ps3 is only useful for watching pictures on a pc monitor or a set that supports HDMI expanded color range.
    RGB limited outputs colors in 15-240 range, which is the same what all movies use and what every tv set expects. Switching to full has the same effect as increasing the contrast setting when you should be lowering the brightness. Now you won't see colors 0-15 and 240-255 on a tv. Loosing dark details and causing white out (extra bloom) Just leave it to limited and adjust brightness and contrast on your tv.

    Same with xbox 360. Set the color space to YCbCr709 when using a tv. The reference level setting (normal, intermediate, expanded) has no effect when using YCbCr709 and the output will be in the correct 15-240 range.

    The best thing you can do for the 360 for 1080p sets is to set the console to 720p output. Most tvs do a far better job at upscaling to a 1080p display then the 360. You will get a bit of overscan since the tv doesn't do a dot by dot conversion but the result is far clearer (less blurry) then by using the 360s 1080p output. The ps3 already outputs 720p games in 720p so has no issue there.

    I have just reset my TV game modes back to default & tried your suggested console settings...... I got to say I'm liking the results so far, I've only had chance to try a few demos on my 360 & PS3, the first thing I noticed was on the Dead Space 2 Demo I didn't need to alter the Gamma Slider on either my PS3 or 360 to barely see the game logo it was fine at default. Thanks for the heads up.

    Great article Richard thanks, I never bought in to the whole expensive £30 up wards HDMI thing, I just use the official Sony & Microsoft HDMI cables.

  • Loghorn #112 1 year ago

    A very well written article! It's definitely proof that cheaper HDMI cables can give you the same quality as an expensive Monster cable. :)

  • RKOwned #113 1 year ago

    For people suggesting I try a calibration disc, I tried that. I Netflixed HD video basics and I also used a THX adjustment thing that was on my Terminator 2 bluray, where they gave me grids and gray scales and stuff like that and told me how to adjust contrast, sharpness, brightness, and etc. But I still dont think i did it right. I couldnt really wrap my head around it and I did the best i could. But when im comparing multiplats, I still notice the PS3 version being not as vibrant or its more washed out then the 360 version alot of times. So I dont know if that is a game thing or a my TV thing. all I know is that when I go to adjust the brightness according to the games recommendation (usualy says adjust until left image is gone, middle image is barely visible, and right image is completely visible) I cant do it right because my TV calibration I made dosent go with the games suggestion in the brightness adjustment. those images dont really show up even when I up the games brightness all the way.

    Really, when i adjusted it I didnt really lower the contrast that much from the default factory settings and the only I lowered by a good sum was brightness.

  • SvennoJ #114 1 year ago

    @RKOwned: "all I know is that when I go to adjust the brightness according to the games recommendation (usualy says adjust until left image is gone, middle image is barely visible, and right image is completely visible) I cant do it right because my TV calibration I made dosent go with the games suggestion in the brightness adjustment. those images dont really show up even when I up the games brightness all the way."

    That's usually a sign of using RGB full on a set that does not support it.

    You calibrated the TV using a blu-ray which the ps3 by default displays as YCbCr. If you want to use RGB full for both games and movies you have to go to Video settings, BD/DVD Video Output Format (HDMI) and set that to RGB. Then the ps3 will convert blu-rays from the standard 15-235 range to the full 0-255 RGB range. Then the black level of games and movies will match. (when using RGB full)

    If you can't make the darkest logo appear then you should make sure RGB full range (HDMI) is set to limited. (which they should have called pc-monitor (full) and tv (limited) to avoid all this confusion)

    Don't bother with super white and deep color as nothing supports it yet.

    If you connect your ps3 with hdmi using an amplifier in between it can also be that the amp cuts of the full RGB signal. I had to download a patch for my Yamaha amp to unlock full RGB. The amp truncated the signal to the 15-235 range setting anything below 15 to 15 and anything above 235 to 235.
    Edited by SvennoJ at 09/01/11 @ 03:25

  • womble #115 1 year ago

    Great article, Richard. You really went the extra miles.

  • RKOwned #116 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: Whats the point in calibrating in RGB Full if my HDTV dosent support RGB Full? I got it like in 2007 where theyre were very few HDTVs that did RGB Full right. Im running RGB on limited. I know for a fact that my TV cant do Full because ive done tests. And I think I cant see the game brightness test images they have because I did calibrations (or tried to do calibrations) on my HDTV itself, meaning my brightness and contrast settings are different then the factory defaults. thats making me think thats why those "Adjust until you can see this imgae" things dont really work for me because I already did brightness calibration on teh Tv itself. My qorry was that I didnt do the TV calibration right or that I did something to make my PS3 games not look as good as 360 version of games. im wondering If I should just go back to the preconfiguration that the TV had as standard, keep what i have now (which is like 77 contrast, 40 brightness) or try to do something else. I know that RGB full did make stuff look more darker, but again because my HDTV cant do it right im getting crushed blacks and im losing detail even if I had the settings on my HDTV at factory default.
    Edited by RKOwned at 09/01/11 @ 03:46

  • SvennoJ #117 1 year ago

    @RKOwned: Sorry, if RGB is set to limited then it must be something else. I was just thinking that if you calibrate by using a video stream then the results won't necessarily carry over to games which use RGB.

    It's suprisingly hard to find simple test patterns on the internet to calibrate brightness and contrast. Here's 2 I uploaded I hope that helps.
    [link url=http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7538/test16.gif
    ]http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/7538/te...[/link]
    [link url=http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/test8.gif
    ]http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/t...[/link]
    2 test patterns with overall medium brightness (to negate dynamic contrast kicking in) to check if your tv can display all the bars. If the tv can't display all bars simultaneously then it's better to loose a few on the bright end of the scale.

    Simple test to check if a tv supports full RGB
    [link url=http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/3781/blackq.gif
    ]http://img823.imageshack.us/img823/3781/...[/link]
    If you can't make the two rectangles in that picture visible with RGB full (or expanded on 360) then your set doesn't support it. If you can't make it visible with RGB set to limited then no idea what to do :( To make them visible decrease contrast and increase brightness. If the contrast is set too high they may never become visible no matter how far you turn up the brightness.
    Edited by SvennoJ at 09/01/11 @ 05:21

  • BIGJOEJGDE #118 1 year ago

    "PlayStation 3 appears to output the framebuffer in exactly the way that developers create it. However, with the advent of the PlayStation 3 Slim, Sony decided to change things around a bit with the hardware make-up of the HDMI interface and this has resulted in a curious side-effect. DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD audio bitstreaming capabilities were added to the HDMI output, and Bravia Link functionality was also included. This came about via a new HDMI controller chip supplied by Panasonic, which appears to have the unfortunate side effect of adding a slight noise to the video output - something we can only assume is a bug in the design. Thankfully it's imperceptible to the human eye, but our HDMI cable hash check would've been a complete non-starter if we'd used the Slim to carry out the tests. It's also the reason we don't use the Slim for performance analysis tests, as unique frame-counting requires the noise to be filtered out. We implemented a fix pretty quickly, but for the sake of precision and ease of use, we simply moved back to the noise-free output of the original "fat" PS3."

    D*mn you Panasonic..I wonder what the "fix" is?
    Edited by BIGJOEJGDE at 09/01/11 @ 06:17

  • RKOwned #119 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ Ok, I did what you said and i did get those squares to appear with RGB on full. I had to increse brightness to 65 and contrast to 77. Im not sure how visible those squares are suppsoe to be though. Do I do it increase until they appear? or if I go too high and they only appear then does that mean it dosent support it? Also, how do I do those other charts properly? Should the contrast be low and the brightness be high for that Sqaure RGB Full test?

  • Savatage #120 1 year ago

    Nice article DF, thanks. One minor quibble:

    "For the record, the HDMI implementations in all the AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards we've used over the last couple of years have been absolutely fine."

    Ermm... surely you mean *ATI* and Nvidia graphics cards, right?

    Unless AMD have expanded and are now doing GPU's, in which case I'm a total muppet for writing this.

    EDIT: Just been on wiki and it would seem that yes, I am indeed a muppet.
    Edited by Savatage at 09/01/11 @ 09:13

  • BIGJOEJGDE #121 1 year ago

    @RKOwned Use this RGB full test image http://i52.tinypic.com/2e21d87.jpg If you can't see at least the top 5 grey boxes with RGB full on then your PS3/360 should be set to RGB limited.
    Edited by BIGJOEJGDE at 09/01/11 @ 07:42

  • RKOwned #122 1 year ago

    @Bigjoejdge: If I cant see them without adjustments to Brightness/contrast?

    also, I cant see the top 5 even now on my computer. I can only see three rows of sqaures going up from bottom.
    Edited by RKOwned at 09/01/11 @ 07:45

  • BIGJOEJGDE #123 1 year ago

    @RKOwned Here's the link to the article that i got the image from http://www.nicolaspeople.com/ch3rokeesbl... very informative :)

  • RKOwned #124 1 year ago

    @BigjoeJgde: like I said, I cant even distuinguish all 28 from my computer monitor here. which makes me wonder if that test is good or not. I cant make out the top top squares on anything.

  • BIGJOEJGDE #125 1 year ago

    I can see 27 on my laptop screen..My guess would be your brightness isn't set high enough or your monitor might not support RGB full.

  • SvennoJ #126 1 year ago

    @RKOwned If you can see any of the first 15 squares then your set supports full RGB. Limited RGB ignores anything below brightness value 15. How many you can see depends on the contrast setting and bit depth of your tv/monitor. Anyway it's just to establish if you can use full RGB or not.

    Use a full grey scale test pattern to set the brightness and contrast correctly.
    [link url=http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/test8.gif
    ]http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/t...[/link]
    You want to try to get black at the lowest light output your tv can do and white at the highest while still being able to see all the bars. Higher brightness will band the brightest bars together, lower brightness bands the blackest bars together. Higher contrast separates the bars further, banding both the blackest and whitest bars together. Too low contrast will make black appear grey. It takes some going back and forth between brightness and contrast to get the image to display correctly.

    Btw you might even see less squares after you get the full grey scale test pattern to display correctly. That can't be helped, you don't want to loose detail on the other end of the spectrum.
    Edited by SvennoJ at 09/01/11 @ 09:00

  • man.the.king #127 1 year ago

    @StooMonster

    "I am going to email a mate who designs HDMI and other video processing chips for optical disc players / displays / projectors and ask him. :) "

    You've got me interested in this thing now too. Please PM me your mate's response if/when he gets back to you with an answer :)

  • [STARS]TyranT #128 1 year ago

    I wish I'd be motivated enough to print this out and take it in to work, where I had a hugely heated discussion with someone at work (who is over 60 no less) about the fact he wasted the best part of 30 quid on a cable that does exactly the same as my 6.99 one. He was telling me under no uncertain terms I was wrong because his was gold plated and all that jazz.

    Haha.

  • Kaddas #129 1 year ago

    Amazon has announce about a new HDMI cable that capable of Transferring Rates of Up to 340Mhz or 10.2gbps. If that the case then I won't listen to me friend who has been bagging me to get the expansive HDMI. I won't spend a valuable money on HDMI.

  • DAN.E.B #130 1 year ago

    monster hdmi leads are shit everyone knows that
    should have compared QED and Van den hull to the budget leads

  • humanchu #131 1 year ago

    Great article!

  • Ryze #132 1 year ago

    It'd be nice to have a test with a high quality moving image - a Blu-Ray clip would be ideal.

    The other issue with cheap cables, is factoring in how long they'll last if the build quality is low. If you plug in and out quite regularly, then the cheapest cables may not last too long.

    I was reminded of this by an old Maxell USB stick that I bought around '04. It was a great deal price-wise (for the time), but the damn thing came apart within a couple of years.

    Do bear in mind build quality in the long term, before grabbing the absolute cheapest cable. As someone else mentioned, there's also the possibility of the signal leaking on cheap cables, affecting other devices. I'm not aware of this, so wont say much about it.

    I'd probably spend £10 on a cable, or less if I'm confident of the build quality, or sure that it's just going to sit motionless, plugged into the TV and a single device.

  • StooMonster #133 1 year ago

    @man.the.king: will do, he's in California and away this weekend. Hopefully get a response this week.

    Just booted up my Mac that has two dual-link monitors, one via DVI and the other with a horrible DisplayPort to Dual-Link DVI connector, the one with digital display data errors has flashing horizontal green lines (and a few tiny red pixel) when screen has a black background.

  • gjgjg #134 1 year ago

    non-facebook thumbs up like it +1 etc
    :)

  • z8Jay #135 1 year ago

    What a pointless test.

    HDMI cables carry a digital signal. This means it either works, or doesn't. As you found out, whatever HDMI cable you use, the results will be the same.

  • ectotropic #136 1 year ago

    @FuzzyDuck - Seems your memory is better than mine! Galvanic corrosion was precisely what I was referring to! Thanks for that! Just to be clear I was not suggesting that Gold was the only or even best choice for it - just mentioned it since the article seemed confused as to why Gold plating was used at all.

    @Dangher - I doubt there would be any difference with 3D other higher bandwidth transfers either, but I'd still like to see the test. I'd guess that if an issue was ever going to show up as an issue it'd be with the high bandwidth stuff. Ideally I'd like to see if fully loading the cables has any effect (i.e. 3D + DTS HD 7.1 all over HDMI) - but really I'm more interested in if the new HDMI supported modes (e.g. 3D) will work properly with cheap older cables. Also would be nice to see if HDCP changes anything. In the end I'm just a completionist :oP

  • Badassbab #137 1 year ago

    BuckoA51

    Which games perform much better at 720p than 1080p upscaled?

  • z8Jay #138 1 year ago

    @BuckoA51 A faulty product is completely different to an inferior one...

  • vizzini #139 1 year ago

    z8jay: What a pointless test.

    HDMI cables carry a digital signal. This means it either works, or doesn't. As you found out, whatever HDMI cable you use, the results will be the same.

    But the digital signal is baseband encode on an analogue wave, which is at the mercy of the properties of the cable. You can safely use an xbox 360 with any hdmi lead that works and experience virtual zero noise, as the hdmi 1.2 specification only requires half the bandwidth(~4GB/s) of hdmi 1.3 compliant cables, but if you have a ps3 with deep colour output enabled in the display options, and have a Deep colour TV with a 10bit, 12bit ,16bit per RGB element (30bit,36bit, 48bit) display panel, then you need a hdmi 1.3 cable, or the two devices will negotiate down to 24bit RGB colour(hdmi 1.2) without telling you. The main difference between Deep colour on the PS3 and standard 24bit RGB will be in the HDR lighting of games. At 24 bit it gets squished into a pseudo HDR instead of full range HDR game lighting.

    Expensive cables are mostly overkill to eliminate transmission errors the human eye can barely detect(which hdmi protocols tolerate), but a very cheap cables with terrible build quality and materials are not a good idea either.

    I've never paid more than £7 for hdmi cables and used them with Deep colour output on both my PS3 phat and PS3 slim conected to my old KDL-46X3000, but I have bought a cheap cable once that did fail with my hdmi 1.2 FreeSat box.

    I'm quite sure that at E3 the platform holders don't use cables that are borderline to the respective hdmi 1.2 and hdmi 1.3 specifications their consoles meet. They might even use the £300 cables to ensure the signal to noise level is optimal and not producing noise that can be seen clearly at cinema projector sizes.

    If DF tested all the cables with oscilloscopes they probably find the expensive cables will be scientifically better. But that probably wouldn't translate to a better picture on most HD TVs or the Dell monitor the DF author uses.

  • j-bo #140 1 year ago

    Interesting to see a What Hi-fi editor being made to look an absolute cock on their own forums by this piece:

    [link url=http://community.whathifi.com/forums/3/556188/ShowThread.aspx
    ]http://community.whathifi.com/forums/3/5...[/link]

    The guy comes across like a bloomin homeopath/faith healer.



  • Munster #141 1 year ago

    @j-bo

    I found the editors apparent lack of understanding quite astonishing, and disappointing that it required an EGer and a couple of others to join that forum to point out his error.

  • malmer #142 1 year ago

    I'm running my projector at 1080p60, from my PS3/360, through a cheap-ass powered hdmi-switch, over one of the cheapest 10 meter hdmi cables I could find (deltaco). Have NEVER had a single pixel error.

  • kentmonkey #143 1 year ago

    He's actually the "consulting" editor. And he can't post a response to any topic without adding extra sarcasm and arrogance.

    The thing is, there's very rarely any need for his sarcasm, but he doesn't appear to know any other way. Which for a man who you would think should have a decent grasp of the English language, considering his position, is actually really rather pitiful. Obviously responding courteously is beyond him though, for one reason or another.

  • RKOwned #144 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: what should my Tvs brightness and Contrast settings be when I do that square check to see if it supports RGB Full?

  • helvetica_bold #145 1 year ago

    So its best to set the 360 HDMI color space to "source"?
    When I set it to YCbCr709 the picture gets dark almost too much contrast.
    However when I set it to RGB it seems even. I dont understand since this
    article states that the 360 outputs natively YCbCr709.What are the settings
    that Digital Foundry uses??
    I think they work on Dell ultrasharp monitors for their face offs, no?

  • SvennoJ #146 1 year ago

    @RKOwned to do the square check, increase the brightness to full and decrease the contrast until you see all the squares, just to check if your tv displays any of the first 15. It either will or won't at all, there should not be anything in between. On a tv that doesn't support RGB full no matter what you do, only the squares from nr 16 and up will show up.
    It's a little different on the 360 due to the internal gamma adjustment which will push more of the squares below the RGB 15 brightness level. So on a tv that doesn't support RGB full you might not be able to see any of the 28 squares. (if you set the 360 to RGB expanded reference levels)

    @helvetica_bold if you set it to source it will use RGB for the dashboard and games, and switch to YCbCr709 for video. Do you use a tv or a monitor? Best to use RGB expanded for monitors. Maybe your tv/monitor has different settings for the different signal? RGB with reference levels on standard should look the same as YCbCr709

  • helvetica_bold #147 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ
    Sometime I use my computer monitor (Dell Ultrasharp 2408) but most of
    the time its connected to my HDTV. When I use expanded it crushes blacks on the
    HDTV and even on the monitor to some extent.
    if you read the AVS Forums, most people say never use expanded it outputs wrong.
    I do agree RGB for games look best though.

  • RKOwned #148 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: first 15 starting at the bottom, right? Also, I thought pretty much no HDTVs made in 2007 could do RGB Full? i bought mine in 2007, so dosent that mean mine cant do it? I dont want to do and and think I can because I did something with my setting when doing that swaure check to give the illusion that I can. Also, when i tried doing adjustments with RGB full, when I was doing setting it so the sqaures showed up everything was super bright and honestly washed out and I had massive Image ghosting. Brightness and Contrast were set pretty high
    Edited by RKOwned at 10/01/11 @ 07:08

  • RKOwned #149 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: Well, I increased my brightness to 100 and was able to see all the squares. im not sure if this means mine can do it right. I also dont trust that I can properly do the calibrating with that gray scale you gave me. I dont really know how to do it right still.

  • secombe #150 1 year ago

    On the high street it's actually very difficult to find a cheap HDMI lead, minimum price in Currys was about 25 quid last time I looked, even Tesco didn't have anything properly cheap.

    With that in mind it's easy to see why many people are sucked in, there isn't a huge amount of choice to shop around in the real world.

    Oddly though, I've always preferred VGA with the 360, technically I'm sure it's inferior, but to my eyes it gives a more pleasing picture quality.

  • influenceuk #151 1 year ago

    Sorry, a £1.50 cable is NOT as good as a £150 one!!
    I used to review HD equipment and can assure you that there are differences when using cheap, medium and high end cables!!

    I went from using a £5 cable from Currys on my PS3 to using a QED for PS3 One (RRP about £50) and there was an imediate difference with the color depth. The pictures look richer, and sharper and playback was smoother!!

    I have even tried a 15 Meter QED HDMI Cable, and once gain picture had multiple improvements.

    Obviously i would not say go buy a £300 quid cable, but get the cables which best suit your budget!!

  • castertroy #152 1 year ago

    Great article bought a HDMI lead from a pound shop can not see any difference. And gonna get a 5 meter one from Amazon for £7!

  • arremelle #153 1 year ago

    great article.

    I use a 10m HDMI cable through a switch box for both xbox360 and ps3 (they are in a different room for silent playing). Totally fine image, no artefacts etc. cable was cheap-as, only £12.

  • petrolgirls #154 1 year ago

    @influenceuk
    Absolute drivel. Embarrassing even - although certainly consistent from someone who works for a publication like What Hi-Fi.

    Oh and meant to say in my earlier post, the difference extends beyond cables. Both Bluray and DVD players all produce exactly the same image too via digital outputs. Those who spend thousands on digital sources are daft. Those who review them and purport to see 'differences' are probably best looking for another job.

  • memeroot #155 1 year ago

    [link url=http://www.avreview.co.uk/news/article/mps/UAN/1170/v/3/sp/
    ]http://www.avreview.co.uk/news/article/m...[/link]

    next thing they'll be selling glasses to improve our gaming ability

  • petrolgirls #156 1 year ago

    More bilge. You have to assume cable companies are paying hacks to come up with this sort of crap.

  • butler` #157 1 year ago

    @influenceuk "there was an imediate difference with the color depth. The pictures look richer, and sharper and playback was smoother"

    It's a digital signal... it's 1s and 0s... they either get there or they do not. You cannot have a higher or lower quality 1 or 0

    stop embarassing yourself

  • butler` #158 1 year ago

    they are in a different room for silent playing

    which is cool, but what about when you want to change discs/games?:p

  • memeroot #159 1 year ago

    I would note that perhaps error correction works better on a still frame....

    not that I'm saying its true....
    Edited by memeroot at 10/01/11 @ 11:28

  • TVoJ #160 1 year ago

    This is great. I bet all those folk who spend stupid amounts of cash on cables lay in thier beds at night thinking "I am right, arent I?" while the rest of us KNOW the truth and get a great nights sleep (usually because we've spent all the money we've saved on some proper good smoke).

  • petrolgirls #161 1 year ago

    @BuckoA51 - you'd need around 27TB to perform your test. Ive done it with several minutes of footage and didn't find one pixel out. Let's be clear, even if you were to find a handful of differing pixels over several hours there would be no perceived difference - terms like 'sharper', 'richer and so forth are laughable in this context.

  • FogHeart #162 1 year ago

    "I would note that perhaps error correction works better on a still frame....

    not that I'm saying its true.... "

    Something along those lines was the initial reaction to the article over at What HiFi - implying that unless the picture is moving, it's not a true scientific test.

    Not likely. The only way you'd get better error correction on a still frame is if the TV kept the previous frames in memory and compared them to build up a more reliable image, by looking for differing pixels in each frame. I really doubt that TVs do that.

  • vizzini #163 1 year ago

    butler`: It's a digital signal... it's 1s and 0s... they either get there or they do not. You cannot have a higher or lower quality 1 or 0

    stop embarassing yourself

    I think if you researched digital communication (not digital electronics working in nanometres) you'd realise that your statement strictly isn't true, in the same way that Digital TV/DAB Radio (Freeview, Freeview HD, Sky, Sky HD, cable and cable HD) all experience errors while working, but have to tolerate them to some degree.

    Whether the digital information is modulating an analogue transverse wave, broadcast down a cable or through the air waves makes no difference to the reality that isochronous video/audio data protocols(like hdmi 1.x) have to be layered (like Fourier analysis)so that under error the high frequency details can be (transparently) lost without losing the entire picture or audio. The extent to which this can realistically happen with hdmi 1.x cables is under analysis here.

    So this discussion is really about to what extent the errors are meaningful for a customer with a £1 or £300 cable for use with either sub-hdmi 1.3 equipment(8bit panels/sources) or hdmi 1.3 and above; assuming 99% of customers have a cable between 1 and 5 metres, and a native HD (HD Ready/Full HD) TV under 60inchs.

    I've already said that I doubt it would mean much for me or most people to have a short £300 cable in stead of a short £10 one; but if the prices fall to £25 for these expensive cables, I'd certainly buy atleast one to check it with my own equipment to compare against my existing £7 cable.

  • FogHeart #164 1 year ago

    @butler: This from the article...."However, very poor quality cabling can present image problems in certain circumstances, and the accepted wisdom that with digital you either get an image or you don't isn't exactly true."

    I haven't read up on how HDMI is encoded, but without breaking the laws of quantum mechanics you'll occasionally get a 1 arriving as a zero and vice versa. So signals have redundancy (extra info to double check with) and error correction (using that extra info to correct where the duff bit has changed). What's been made clear by these articles is that while everyone was assuming that lots of errors are creeping in during transmission, overwhelming the algorithms of the error correction hardware leading to compromised detail/colour in the image, in fact you have to have a very poor cable over a very long distance to produce a signal with so many errors that the error correction cannot use the redundancy in the transmission to correct those errors entirely without compromise.
    Edited by FogHeart at 10/01/11 @ 13:52

  • butler` #165 1 year ago

    @vizzini

    i'm not talking about digital tv or radio

  • butler` #166 1 year ago

    I know I'm over simplifying things in my post, but the point still stands.

    I never said anything about an image or no image, and I'm well aware of HDMI artefacts, however unlikely in 'normal' setups.

    Do note that the only mention of artefacts in the whole article is when they bring a cheapo repeater into the equation.

  • vizzini #167 1 year ago

    I knew you weren't, but the same rules apply for all digital (isochronous) data sources were the delivery window for the data to remain relevant is very strict.

    Transferring data packets for files is different because the terminating device can always ask for the packet to be resent if the CRC check fails, and the transfer won't be unduly affected by the round trip latency this communication adds.

    But games are interactive and work with live video/audio, and so adding latency would impede playability; in the same way that TV processing overhead is bad. So the TV has to work with the data it has (which might add small amounts of latency from the predictive error recovery processing).

    Maybe the cabling results would show a difference in very noisy electrical environments(mobile phone near cable, Dewalt power tool, washing machine, dishwasher running running, other console wirelessly streaming video close by, etc), but I wouldn't be surprised if this didn't make much difference either, and only very long cable lengths produced meaningful noise or signal propagation problems.

  • SvennoJ #168 1 year ago

    @RKOwned It's whether the top two lines of squares are visible in http://i52.tinypic.com/2e21d87.jpg to check if your set supports full RGB

    4 simple steps to calibrate your tv using [link url=http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/test8.gif
    ]http://img522.imageshack.us/img522/350/t...[/link]
    Compare what you see to one of these and follow the instructions
    [link url=http://img547.imageshack.us/img547/3650/contrasttoohigh.jpg
    ]http://img547.imageshack.us/img547/3650/...[/link]
    [link url=http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9702/brightnesstoohigh.jpg
    ]http://img407.imageshack.us/img407/9702/...[/link]
    [link url=http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/1593/brightnesstoolow.jpg
    ]http://img840.imageshack.us/img840/1593/...[/link]
    [link url=http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4804/contrasttoolow.jpg
    ]http://img153.imageshack.us/img153/4804/...[/link]
    Keep repeating these steps until you're happy with the result.

  • Soton4084 #169 1 year ago

    Very good article, thank you Eurogamer!

    I was considering buying a more expensive cable at one point to replace a cheap one I got on ebay, but am glad I didn't now!

  • CaptainQuint #170 1 year ago

    Heh heh, I see the thread made about this article on the WhatHiFi forums has been deleted...

  • RKOwned #171 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: Im sorry for asking again, but when im doing that square test for RGB Full, if I turn my brightness all the way to 100 and I can see all the sqaures, then that means my TV supports it? that seems odd. Or is it if I cant see anything with my normal setting then it dosent support it? Im sorry, but I dont exactly have nayone I can ask over and look at my TV that knows about this stuff.

  • vizzini #172 1 year ago

    BuckoA51: Some science to back-up the case that it's not just a matter of sending 0's and 1's.

    That was a great link and nicely covers the physical layer element; were the transmission errors occur and how the 1's and 0's get corrupted at the receiver.

    I was wanting to move up to the next ISO Model layer and look at the protocol(hdmi 1.3+ is CEA-861-D and hdmi 1.0-1.2a is CEA-861-B) to see how the protocol handles the errors and how that might alter the picture quality; if at all.

    Sadly those documents aren't freely available from the people(http://www.ce.org/) who manage the standards for hdmi, so I guess we are still no clearer to a conclusion on whether better built category 2 hdmi cables(ultrafasts) produce better hdmi picture quality than lesser built ultrafasts when transferring Deep Colour(above 24bit RGB) and 3D from Ps3 and 3D Blu-ray.

    Strangely, for the first time ever, I'm now considering buying a cable with better components, just to see if I can notice any difference.

  • RKOwned #173 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: ok, so I found out my HDTv cant do RGB Full well. So I used those test patterns to calibrate using limited, and am not sure if I have it right. Is a 92 contrast and like a 80 something brightness seem to high? Thats the only way I could get it to display all the black lines. And i think im getting weird ghosting now.

  • butler` #174 1 year ago

    The on/off part is true, but the quality of the signal does matter and a poor cable will impair your video quality more than you may imagine.

    Yeah, except it won't. :p And, more importantly to this thread, the opposite isn't the case: a better quality cable won't provide a better quality image.

    Interesting read though on a theoretical level, reminds me of being at uni.

  • omniscient #175 1 year ago

    this begs the questio,n wtf are you paying for if your hdmi cable costs 100 pounds.

  • SvennoJ #176 1 year ago

    @RKOwned You can always go with lower contrast and then lower the brightness and still get the whole test pattern in view. Lower brightness will reduce the ghosting. If you have an lcd tv and the option to dim the backlight, try that first.

    Back to cables, overpriced digital cables started with optical toslink cables and dolby digital AC-3 audio cables. A $2 optical toslink cable does the same job as a $100 monster toslink cable. And those come gold plated too, while there isn't even any electrical signal to transmit.

  • vizzini #177 1 year ago

    I order a new hdmi lead that should be much better than my existing (10.2Gbps) lead for build quality and performance (15.2Gbps). It turns out, that when a lead says it is ATC(authorized test centre approved) that means hdmi technology founders NXP semiconductors, HDCP labs, Silicon Image, Philips, Panasonic or Sony tested. These are the official worldwide test centres on hdmi.org.

    An old discussion(2006) about hdmi 1.3 cables on hdtvmagazine, with the magazine's technical expert, a engineer who designs/builds hdmi test equipment and input from a hdmi founder's press department (Silicon image). Pretty much says the following.

    Cables need to meet a specification and the important manufacturing criteria is that D-,D+ pairs are identical in length(because of the differential signal) which are a source of 0's, 1's error.
    Better cables in testing do facilitate cleaner transfers, but at under 5 metres they all work near perfectly, and the most important component is the quality of the TVs hdmi receiver chip to correct errors rather than the cable.

    So the only advantage I think better cables might have is lower latency, because error correction will in theory take a few milliseconds more processing than a perfectly clean connection, and even if all chips can error correct the same, they might not do with the same processing latency; thereby adding to any delay the panel has in game mode, and a reason TV manufactures don't give this panel delay information.

    Any way, it turns out the new cable I've order is 3m, hdmi 1.4 compliant, 15.2Gbps; complete overkill for 30bit Deep colour (that only needs 10.2Gbps). It is made by Neet; who claim to be a green spin off company of a hdmi founder (Sony), hence the ATC testing; surprisingly it costs just under £10, which is a lot less than the $200 for the pdf of the protocol specification.
    Edited by vizzini at 12/01/11 @ 02:15

  • Arwin #178 1 year ago

    Fyi, my Samsung is from 2006 and it supports Full RGB perfectly.
    Edited by Arwin at 11/01/11 @ 19:27

  • RKOwned #179 1 year ago

    @SvennoJ: but then wouldnt that mean ill lose detail in dark areas? Because Brightness and contrast are low?

  • helvetica_bold #180 1 year ago

    Do any of you use the xbox 360 expanded reference level?
    I have a great monitor, Dell 2408 and it still seems to crush blacks.
    Anyone else use this monitor?

  • vizzini #181 1 year ago

    @helvetica_bold
    It sounds like you've got the same problem I used to have with my old Panasonic projector last gen. It was great for Nintendo's games with bright colours(Windwaker/Sunshine/Double Dash) and reasonable for films and PES mostly due to image size; but for games like Snake Eater with heavy use of light/dark tones, it just didn't have a (dynamic)contrast ratio big enough (1,000:1 iirc) to produce a great balanced image.

    I ended up having to increase brightness to allocate some range to the dark shades, leaving the colours looking washed out, and the light shades getting crushing by the same amount as the dark shades, producing a image that was only great in the middle range.

    Depending on the game I wanted to play, using a screen with a dynamic contrast ratio of less than ~10,000:1 has been a convincing argument in the past for me to use SD(scart/s-video) on a CRT TV.

  • Sheriff_1972 #182 1 year ago

    Remember that the transition from a '0' to a '1' is an analogue transfer function....