Read This Before Buying Your Next HDMI Device

A long time pet peeve of mine deals with the accessory up-sell you often get pitched when purchasing a piece of technology. Did you forget your $300 full tilt/swivel wall mount kit for the $150 19" LCD set you just bought? How about that $10 a foot speaker wire for those $50 bookshelf speakers you picked up on sale? And with the advent of the HDMI standard and its adoption in high definition audio/video, the accessory vultures have been relentless.

Go down to Best Buy some day and pick up the latest and greatest high def TV and then try to find an HDMI cable to hook it up to your high definition source. Of course the salesman will be happy to show you to their cable aisle for a nice selection of $75 and up cables all while telling you that this one with the gold connectors or that one with the low loss cabling is needed to fully experience your new toy.

Don't believe them.

If you walk into your typical electronics store to buy an HDMI cable, you're likely to see prices upward of $50 with promises of better performance and faster speeds. Do you really need to spend that much money on a single HDMI cable?

Absolutely not--those cables are a rip-off. You should never pay more than $10 for a standard six-foot HDMI cable. And despite what salesmen and manufacturers might tell you, there's no meaningful difference between the $10 cable and the $50 cable. Unless you see something obvious, such as dropouts or a flashing screen, the digital information transmitted by both cables is exactly the same--no cable can make the picture any better or any worse. We've used cables from many different companies in the past--such as Belkin, Accell, Monoprice, Monster, and SimplayHD--and have not run into any consistent issues with any brand of cable. With working cables and solid connections, we've seen no dropouts and "sparklies"--just consistent, dependable, high-quality audio and video. It's that simple.

So what should you do as last I checked most big box stores don't carry these low priced cables? I would highly recommend that you go on over to Monoprice and pick up 2 or 3 now so that the next time you impulse buy that sweet 50" set you call tell the salesman no thank you when he points you to the cable section.

That $1000 high def beauty doesn't have to also mean a $100 cable.