US Launch details!

[partridge]

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20505

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20509

This looks like the best launch line up ever, not all are day one, but still.

You guys are so lucky, I don't even have a set date for the launch here..

[kikkomaniac]

Originally Posted by partridge

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20505

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20509

This looks like the best launch line up ever, not all are day one, but still.

You guys are so lucky, I don't even have a set date for the launch here..

im from Denmark..... im just hoping for "sometime 2007"

[partridge]

And more from EA

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20521

Note the references to blu-ray storeage. I really don't think it will be too long before multi format games are being cut down for the Xbox360 due to limited storeage.

[ay221]

Oh yuck did you read that one link:

Although both the 20GB and 60GB versions of the console include HDMI support, to make use of this feature consumers will need to buy the official HDMI cable for USD 49.99

Tell me it aint so.

[phranctoast]

I call BS.

[Jazar]

Originally Posted by ay221

Oh yuck did you read that one link:

Although both the 20GB and 60GB versions of the console include HDMI support, to make use of this feature consumers will need to buy the official HDMI cable for USD 49.99

Tell me it aint so.

Where the heck did you read that? If that were true I'd seroiusly consider just selling my pre-order.

[ay221]

Originally Posted by Jazar

Where the heck did you read that? If that were true I'd seroiusly consider just selling my pre-order.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=20509


I think they must be mistaken.

[Jazar]

Thanks for the link. I hope that's just horribly worded. Shame on gameindustry.biz for adding uncertanty.

The back of the PS3 looks like a standard HDMI port:

http://www.ps3land.com/images/ps3gal...06/Img3732.jpg

[dobyblue]

Not that 49.99 is a bad price for an HDMI cable though!

[JTK]

Originally Posted by dobyblue

Not that 49.99 is a bad price for an HDMI cable though!

Yeah, that's an ok price.

www.monoprice.com

www.ramelectronics.net

^^ Take a look.

You can put yourself way over the top on an HDMI cable of respectable length and quality for under $50, to be sure.

[dobyblue]

Yes, HDMI PRO cables from Ultralink are $200 or the Nordost WryeWizard for US$229 for 10m.

$49.95 is not a bad price for an HDMI cable. That price for $6 on the mono site - you ever tested it with a 1080p signal?

[WriteSimply]

Originally Posted by dobyblue

Yes, HDMI PRO cables from Ultralink are $200 or the Nordost WryeWizard for US$229 for 10m.

$49.95 is not a bad price for an HDMI cable. That price for $6 on the mono site - you ever tested it with a 1080p signal?

You don't need a HDMI 1.3 to carry 1080p so a cheap cable from Monoprice will definitely work.

You need HDMI 1.2 cables to get DSD (SACD sound format), MLP (DVD-Audio sound format) Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD off the PS3. You need HDMI 1.3 to get TrueHD and DTS HDMA, both undecoded, off the PS3 to be decoded by a seperate receiver.

HDMI 1.3 adds more color depth but none of the current displays nor the BD format has the ability to deliver that depth.

So go cheap on the cables so long as it's not over 10 feet.


fuad

[phloyd]

I use the cheap Monoprice cables and they work fine.

I am not sure that I have had an HDMI to HDMI that works at 1080p to test that per se, but never had any issues at 1080i.

They seem to be pretty decent cables actually... and an indication of just how much the likes of Best Buy etc make on cables when they sell a bundle.

[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by WriteSimply

You don't need a HDMI 1.3 to carry 1080p so a cheap cable from Monoprice will definitely work.

You need HDMI 1.2 cables to get DSD (SACD sound format), MLP (DVD-Audio sound format) Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD off the PS3. You need HDMI 1.3 to get TrueHD and DTS HDMA, both undecoded, off the PS3 to be decoded by a seperate receiver.

HDMI 1.3 adds more color depth but none of the current displays nor the BD format has the ability to deliver that depth.

So go cheap on the cables so long as it's not over 10 feet.


fuad

Nor are there any receivers currently capabale of decoding DTHD or DTSMA.
I never go cheap on cables.
I read reviews and find that some of those cheaper cables, even at 10ft, have drop out and picture artifacts. Much like speaker cable I don't believe I need $7000 Blue HEaven cables to appreciate my speakers or my SACDs, but I do believe that the whole "copper wire is just as good as the priciest speakers cable" argument is a load of nonsense.

I'm still 10 months away from buying a PS3 and an HDTV anyway, for me the audio comes first which is why I'm halfway done with my system.
Pioneer Elite DV-45
Pioneer VSX-1014TX
Paradigm Monitor 11
Paradigm CC-370
Ultralink Excelsior 2.4 cables
Just got another set of 11s for the rears and a Servo 15 to go, then I'll start on the video. Can't afford to do everything at once, nor can I risk it. (WAF)

Originally Posted by phloyd

I use the cheap Monoprice cables and they work fine.

I am not sure that I have had an HDMI to HDMI that works at 1080p to test that per se, but never had any issues at 1080i.

They seem to be pretty decent cables actually... and an indication of just how much the likes of Best Buy etc make on cables when they sell a bundle.

Best Buy do make a lot on cables, so does anyone that sells Monster. Good to know you haven't had any issues with the monos.
There are however cables like Ultralink that are worth the price you're paying.

[Jazar]

HDMI cables are different from speaker wire. HDMI is pure digital. In other words, for the most part either it works or it doesn't. Would you buy a Monster USB cable for copying files from one PC to another? It's more or less the same principle. There's no reason to spend more then 10 bucks on HDMI @ monoprice.com.

[dobyblue]

Originally Posted by Jazar

HDMI cables are different from speaker wire. HDMI is pure digital. In other words, for the most part either it works or it doesn't. Would you buy a Monster USB cable for copying files from one PC to another? It's more or less the same principle. There's no reason to spend more then 10 bucks on HDMI @ monoprice.com.

I disagree with this. Digital drop outs can be caused by the materials that are used in cable. Capacitance is a factor also.
I defer to blue jeans explanation.

What Makes one HDMI Cable Better than Another, and Does it Matter?
HDMI cable quality is a bit complicated, and unfortunately, it's hard to judge from a spec sheet, especially because very few manufacturers provide any useful product specs. There are a few things to bear in mind.

At present, to our knowledge, all HDMI cables are built in China. We are occasionally asked why we source ours out while our competitors build their own; the answer is that our competitors don't really build their own, but simply source them out from a Chinese cable assembly house and then neglect to mention the fact. Further, to our knowledge, all raw HDMI cable presently on the market also comes from China. Although the technical capabilities of American cable manufacturers greatly exceed anything the Chinese can do, nobody sources raw cable from the US for assembly in China. That's about to change; we have had cable for HDMI and DVI applications designed and prototyped by Belden and plan to bring it to market by late 2006, and our bench tests of the product indicate that it will carry all resolutions up to at least 100 feet and 480p up to at least 180 feet. But in the meanwhile, don't let the fact that an HDMI cable bears a U.S. brand name lead you to believe that that a particular HDMI cable contains American products, American labor or American know-how; none of them do.

The Chinese source problem makes it very hard to get a spec sheet, and very hard to know what that spec sheet means, when dealing with an HDMI cable. Most vendors of HDMI cable in the US don't know what attributes would make a good HDMI cable, and since they don't participate in the manufacture beyond specifying jacket printing and the shape of the molded connector, they don't really have much reason to find out.

The result is that most citations to product spec that one finds in connection with the sale of HDMI cable are references to the product's wire gauge. Wire gauge is somewhat meaningful, but judging HDMI cable quality by comparing wire gauge is like judging automobile quality by comparing engine block length--a very, very inexact way of looking at the problem.

The primary work of an HDMI cable is done by the four shielded twisted pairs which carry the color, sync, and clock signals. The designers of the HDMI standard made an inexcusable error of judgment in running these signals balanced, in twisted pairs, rather than unbalanced, in coaxes; attenuation (the tendency of the signal to get weaker with distance) is much greater, and impedance is harder to control, in twisted pairs than in coax. Control of the cable impedance is critical to keeping the rounding of the bit edges under control; the more the impedance wanders off of spec, the more the signal will round, and the closer the cable comes to failure. Where a coaxial cable's impedance can be controlled within two percent of spec, it's a challenge to keep a twisted pair any tighter than about 15% plus or minus.

The HDMI signal will fail if attenuation is too high, or if the bit transitions become excessively rounded so that the receiving unit can't reconstitute them accurately. There's no really reliable benchmark for just how much attenuation is acceptable, or how round the shoulders can be, before the "sparklies" will start. (Yes, there are specs for these things in the official HDMI spec document, but real-world devices vary so much that meeting the spec is no guarantee of success, while failing it is no guarantee of actual failure.) But while wire gauge has much to do with the former, it's really the latter that's important; and wire gauge has nothing to do, at least directly, with impedance control.

Transmission line impedance, in any cable, is dependent on the cable's materials and physical dimensions. For purposes of an HDMI cable, these are:
1. the shape and size of the paired wires;
2. the thickness, and dielectric properties, of the insulation on the paired wires;
3. the dimensions of the shield over the pair.
These seem, in principle, like simple things to control--that is, until one spends a bit of time in a wire and cable factory and finds out just how many little problems there are. Wire is never perfect; its dimensions and shape vary from point to point, and small dimensional variations can make for significant impedance changes. Wire can suffer from periodicity because it's been drawn over a wheel that was microscopically out-of-round, and that periodicity will cause the wire to resonate at particular wavelengths, which can really wreak havoc. The plastic dielectric has to be consistently extruded to the correct diameter (and thousandths of an inch matter here!); if it's foamed, it needs to have highly consistent bubble size so that one side of the dielectric isn't airier than another, or one foot airier than the next. The two wires in the pair need not to wander in relation to one another; as they "open up" or are pressed tightly together with cable flexing, the impedance changes. The shield is a factor in the impedance as well, because both signal wires have capacitance to the shield, and if the foil is wrapped more tightly in one place and more loosely in another, that, too, will cause impedance to vary. (And these are just the obvious problems; manufacturing processes involve other problems that nobody not involved in manufacturing would ever think of. For example, the lube that's used to assist in wire drawing needs to be washed off the wire before dielectric is extruded over it; what if the side from which a jet of cleaner is fired at the wire gets cleaner than the opposite side, and the dielectric winds up conforming differently to one side of the cable than the other? What about the other thousand things you and I, not working in a wire factory, have never even begun to think about?) As a result, although every manufacturer's HDMI cable is built to meet a nominal 100 ohm characteristic impedance, every foot of every cable is different from every other. The best one can do is to hold impedance within a range, centered on 100 ohms; the official HDMI spec calls for 100 ohms plus or minus 15%, which for a coax would be horribly sloppy. The tighter that tolerance can be kept, the better the performance will be.

Impedance control is important for another reason: timing. As impedance varies, so will the time it takes a signal to travel down the cable. Electricity travels at nearly the speed of light; how close to the speed of light it travels depends on the dielectric, and is referred to as the "velocity of propagation." The objective, in putting together the four pairs in an HDMI cable, is to have them be identical; but in actual practice, each pair in a four-pair set will have its own delay. If the delay of one pair is sufficiently greater than the delay of another pair, the receiving device will not know which "red" pixel belongs to which "blue" and "green" pixel, or if the clock circuit is off, it may be impossible to time any of the color signals reliably. Since this delay depends on the consistency and dimensions of the dielectric, and the consistency and dimensions of the dielectric are important factors in impedance, the same requirement for consistent impedance applies here; if impedance is too inconsistent, timing will be too inconsistent, and the whole system will fail.

I think there's a lot more to it than suggesting just because it's digital means that any cable works.

[Jazar]

Originally Posted by dobyblue

I disagree with this. Digital drop outs can be caused by the materials that are used in cable. Capacitance is a factor also.
I defer to blue jeans explanation.

I think there's a lot more to it than suggesting just because it's digital means that any cable works.

Wow that's a very long discussion that details almost nothing about how cheap cable can affect actual audio and picture quality. I'll just say again that HDMI cable transmits digital data. The only thing that screws with an HDMI connection is distance, as attenuation becomes too high to get the data (or much of anything) through. This is simply an issue of physics and it affects all cables. A standard HDMI cable (28 AWG) can go for at least 15 feet without running into this problem.

I've used my $6 HDMI cable for almost a year now and it provides an unsurpassed (IMO) PQ and AQ experience. I can't imagine something that costs 10x or more would provide 10x or more satisfaction.

[theknub]

obviously, the insulation and conductivity will play a factor to an extent. i think we can all agree on that. however, if we're only running 6' our risk is relatively low of there being an issue. if we start running longer than 10', we may have an entirely different discussion.

[dobyblue]

...and I guess if you occasionally missed 1 out of every few thousand pixels you probably wouldn't pick it up anyway.
Perhaps I will start with the cheapo cable after all. I can't see my needing more than 10ft anyway, especially with the Bluetooth controllers.

[JTK]

Originally Posted by dobyblue

Yes, HDMI PRO cables from Ultralink are $200 or the Nordost WryeWizard for US$229 for 10m.