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It is an issue that should not raise any doubt. Everyone knows that HDMI is a lossless digital audio and video transmission, so the logical conclusion is that the cables – no matter how expensive or cheap they are – should work or not. Here there is no middle ground.

But someone has ever proven, capturing the HDMI port traffic using cables of different qualities? Is there a real need to buy the HDMI cable about 800 € ?

First a little history. Shortly before Christmas retweeted this table of “truths” on Twitter Digital Foundry, which led us to an interesting conversation with Tim Clark, the editor of Official PlayStation Magazine, about how their tests showed differences depending on cable used . A difference in the depth of color, perhaps? The HDMI standard supports different color formats (xv deep color, YPrPb 4:2:2, 4:4:4 YPrPb, 24-bit RGB), but the game they used, Killzone 2 – like all other games know – uses only RGB, so we were intrigued.

Human perception is a funny thing. As technology becomes more complex games, so does the composition of sound and images that come to our senses. A console running at native 720p 30FPS 28,648,000 pixels per second sent to us. The 7.1 audio is uncompressed audio 384,000 different samples sent in the same period of time (yes, even the .1 channel has an output to 48000Hz as the other seven channels – I checked with Sony).

It is incredible, of course, but comparing two different wires using the same screen is not correct. Two identical screens, calibrated with great precision in the same way, running side by side … it might be instructive, but it remains unscientific. Human perception is important, but certainly not be measured or quantified.

The frame-rate analysis was one of our responses to the limitations of human perception – a bit of science that gives us accurate and error-free performance level of the games we play. Can we do the same to test various HDMI cables? The truth is that the principles of frame-rate analysis – Data analysis HDMI – allows us to do exactly that. All you have to do is capture the same video output using different HDMI cables and then use something as basic as a MD5 checksum hash to make sure the image is really the same.

Is our solution? Taking a screenshot RGB 24-bit lossless 1080p game (Gran Turismo 5 was the obvious choice) and then pass through the display of photos of the PlayStation 3. We use our model 60GB NTSC release for reasons explained later.

Initially try to simply pause the game, hoping it would give us the same static image. However, although the break is on, the renderer is still working and producing different microscopic frames, invisible to the human eye, but not for our analysis tools – so there was no way for our mathematically precise checksums would work.

What HDMI cable should try? Before Christmas we bought a couple of cables on Amazon that cost a few Euros each. Digital Foundry’s coffers can not afford to spend nearly € 800 on an HDMI cable, and much less several thousand in the 5-meter, but if you buy a Monster Cable 1000HD two meters, the price varies between € 86 and € 120 (!) depending on your ability to search on Google.

As a middle ground between cheap cable and monstrously expensive, we use the official wire 360 ??from Microsoft – it costs about 36 € with the audio dongle – and the equivalent of Sony, the price is around 20 €.

Of course, the cheap cable from Amazon seems thinner and of lower quality than the other, while the Monster has some nice connectors and a comforting level of weight and volume. The Microsoft is, well, gray … but otherwise unremarkable. These are gold-plated outputs, but Sony does not even bother with its cable that officer – and any engineer who knows what he’s talking will tell you that, first, the benefits of bathing in gold are debatable and totally useless a digital cable like this. The good news is that Sony cable but is expensive (about 20 €) at least three meters long, while it is normal that the cables have a length of only 1.8 or 2 meters.