Customers Gleefully Mock Best Buy's $1,095.99 HDMI 369
First time accepted submitter Forthan Red writes "It may be a pricing bot run amok, or a ridiculously over-inflated sense of worth, but Best Buy has been offering an HDMI cable for a whopping $1,095.99 (currently sold out!). While Best Buy seems to be oblivious to the absurdity of this price for a digital cable, those posting customer reviews are not. Enjoy the mockery!" One of my favorites is: "saved a ton of money on a new TV on black Friday and decided to use the extra cash to get the best cable available. At a whopping 3.3 feet in length, this cable is no joke. When all my friends come over to watch football, they always say 'WOW what kind of HDMI cable do you have?' I proudly tell them about my audioquest diamond and its advanced features such as its Dark Gray/Black finish. It is a great conversation piece! Not to mention it fits into my dvd player and tv perfectly."
Misplaced decimal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this perhaps a $10.95 HDMI cable?
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:1, Insightful)
Can't tell if troll or not. HDMI is a digital interface so cable quality isn't all that important.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:2, Insightful)
The prices can seemingly look high, but remember that these products are used for tax writeoffs.
Anyone stupid enough to pay this much for... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:No, often not (Score:5, Insightful)
Audiophiles have been in a quandary ever since the CD came out. In the analog world, the more you spent, the better the gear sounded*. Nobody needed "golden ears" to hear the difference between a $50 turntable, a $100 turntable, and a $500 turntable.
Not so with digital audio. Maybe someone can tell the difference between a $.25 DAC and a $100 DAC, but I can't.
You guys all know (at least I hope you do) that a $2 digital cable works just as well as a $2000 digital cable; noise only affects an analog signal. Costly RCA cables and speaker cables may be worth it if you have more dollars than sense, but you're better off spending that cash on expensive booze or better, giving it to charity.
*With the exception of fools who bought into quadraphonics: a $700 stereo sounded far better than a $1000 quad setup, since you needed two of everything for quad.
Because you are screwing something up (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no way when things are set up properly that HDMI looks worse. The reason is that it is all digital. LCDs are, of course, digital devices. So is the computer. When you go to VGA the signal gets converted to analogue, and then the LCD has to convert it back to digital to make it usable. There is room for error there.
If I was to guess I'd say there are three potential problems you have:
1) Overscan. This is a throwback to the tube days and it is stupid that it is still implemented, but there you go. You want no overscan on your TV or graphics card, they both can be set to do it. You want 1:1 pixel mapping on both sides.
2) Colour levels. Again going back to the old NTSC tube days and their conversion to digital the levels for TVs aren't 0-255, they are 16-235. You can look up the technical reasons if you like, too long to type it all out. You don't want that for a computer source though. So you need to tell the TV to accept the full range input, and the computer to generate it.
3) Chroma subsampling. TVs have a lot of internal processing these days and it is usually not done at full rez, to save on effort. DVD, Blu-ray, and ATSC are 4:2:0 which means for each 4x4, 16 pixel block there are 16 luma samples but only 4 chroma samples. So TVs often process in 4:2:2 (8 chroma samples) which still does plenty well. You don't want that for a computer, it's output is 4:4:4 (no chroma subsampling) and computers rely on accurate control of it. So you need to disable all your TV's processing, often called "game mode" and also if your TV has a specific HDMI port marked for computer or DVI, use that.
Properly done, nothing looks better than digital when using a digital monitor. There is a perfect 1:1 transfer of information from the card to the monitor. Any analogue phase can only degrade things, not make it better. However HDMI and TVs were designed for the video world which on account of the legacy of NTSC has some seriously stupid and fucked up standards. Thus if you set shit wrong, it'll look bad.
So if you are wondering why VGA might look better it is because those things I mention are already set right. The computer doesn't do overscan on VGA (it is a computer connector, overscan is not done there), the TV knows colour levels are full range, and processing is disabled. On your HDMI inputs, you need to set it up.
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:5, Insightful)
Keep going... (Score:2, Insightful)
Yep. But please take it further.
The crappier the cable, the harder those codecs have to work. Work them hard enough and they start to make errors. Make enough errors and the results become audible.
Look, I'm not saying the people who pay $500 for a special audio USB cable are right. I tend to think that once you get above "good enough" there's no use in spending more money. I also tend to think that the level of "good enough" is fairly low.
But I'll never dismiss the audio crazies completely. I was there when CDs came out. I knew they were "perfect sound forever" because all the advertising, all the magazine reviews, and all the completely unimpeachable science by highly-degreed people in white lab coats told me so.
I also knew they sounded like crap. I knew I could tell the difference between the first-gen Magnavox and Sony players (for those old enough to remember that battle). I nearly screamed in pain the first time I heard a second-gen CD player (Phase Linear! Yeehaw!) swapped into a high-end system that otherwise used a Goldmund Reference for the source.
Even after CD-based systems started to sound OK, it was easy as pie to hear the difference between run of the mill players made by manufacturers who didn't acknowledge the existence of clock jitter and those high-end players made by people who openly admitted they weren't quite sure what was going on but they were trying to measure and design-out the problems.
The science of reproduced audio always advances in the same way. Scientists declare that if it isn't being measured, it can't be heard. Human ears hear things that scientists declare cannot exist. Some scientists try to quantify what people report hearing. Some succeed. A new measure is born. The state of the art is advanced. Scientists then once again declare that there's nothing being heard because we don't have a measurement for it. And the cycle starts all over again.
I don't care if I can't hear the difference between cables or players or room treatments. I don't care if scientists can't measure a difference. If someone says they can hear it, I'll politely let them have their say and walk away without judgement. Far more often than the "if we can't measure it, it doesn't exist" crowd would like to admit, those people turn out to be onto something real, something measurable...once the scientists get around to inventing the instruments and protocols to do the measuring.
I sure wish some of the /. crowd would be as open-minded.
Re:Really! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:They may be mocking the price but (Score:4, Insightful)
Uhhh, not quite.
Different kinds of food have different chemical composition which results in different combination of neurons firing etc etc etc.
Different kinds of cables - as long as they do transmit the data faithfully, which doesn't take $1000 cable - result in same signal arriving at the acoustic system receiver.
IOW, $90 bottle of wine and three-buck-Chuck objectively give different experience - what subjective is only whether it is a better experience or not, but $20 cable and $1000 cable give objectively same experience.