Mrs. Quip and I recently bought a brand spanking new HDTV. We’ve been very happy with the purchase with the exception of one thing – the ridiculous price of HDMI cables charged at Best Buy and Circuit City. Now I’ve been a technophile for a long time now, and own more than a fair share of antiquated technologies that are gathering dust in the garage (anyone need an 8-track player?). Most of those gadgets required some cable or other and were usually included as a throwaway item.
The cost of HDMI cables, as a result, struck me as really odd.
So I went online to find the reasoning. Here’s the first thing I found…
We dug a little deeper, and noticed that Best Buy wasn’t the only electronics purveyor hopping on the HDMI gravy train. Checking online stores, it appears that everyone wants to get in on the act of selling Monster Cable‚Äîor any HDMI Cable‚Äîfor seemingly inflated prices. Of course, these cables are gold plated, right? Help us out here. Is there really $143.62 worth of difference?
Now, Gizmodo is not exactly a site for Luddites. If they’re perplexed by the high cost, there must be something going on, right?
I clicked through the link in the post and found a 6ft cable, gold plated, and certified to perform at HDMI standards for $17.93.
Huh? How can that be, you ask? Surely they must be selling these cables at a huge loss. If the major retailers are hawking them at $130, there must be so much gold in the wire that it has to cost that much, right?
Apparently, no. I ordered two of the cables (which actually lowered my price per piece by $1). I should have them in a couple of days. When I get them hooked up, I’ll post my findings here. Maybe some Cal-Tech engineer could attach up some fancy meter and tell me the difference, but I suspect, as Gizmodo’s readers did, that the real difference between the two is their marketing teams.
I experimented with monster cables that I got at best buy for $115 and a set of no-name I got on amazon.com for $21; we had recently gone to a 40" samsung 1080p LCD TV in our bedroom. I played with all the adjustments for the Samsung; read user comments online on how to get it perfect, all using the Besy Buy cable. I then switched out for the Amazon brand and I swear, they was not a single perceptional difference. I test the HDNet channel, ESPN and obviously the Discovery HD channel and there is not a single freaking difference. Needless to say I now have a $115 best buy credit. Its a complete racket and its already been written about online in a few places. what a joke.
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