Things to know before buying a TV – Cables

Before you go out and spend a huge chunk of change on a cables for your TV there are some things that you should know about these cables. Please know that I have a decent amount of experience with selling TV’s and I know all the tricks that retail companies will use to get you to buy that more expensive cable. However I want this to be a massive article about all the types of TV cables you can buy, so I’ll start with the worst quality and move my way up to the best quality.

Coaxial Cable

These are those cables that come out of the ground and go into your TV. Alternatively they may also come out of your Satellite and down to your TV. These cables really don’t have any kind of fluff or anything special about them, they take your picture and audio signal from point A and move it to point B. You can buy 100′ of coaxial cable for around $40, anything more and you are really spending too much money.

Composite Cable

These really aren’t any better than your Coaxial Cable however since you do have 3 different cables I have to give this a little bit of a boost. These give you one cable for your video and another 2 cables for your right and left audio. Some interesting things about these cables is the color of the cable end is irrelevant. Sometimes your yellow cable will have more shielding, and because of that you may want to choose nothing but a yellow video cable for all 3 (video and left and right audio) however you have the different colors because it helps you ensure the correct cables goes to the correct input. With these cables it’s hard to recommend anything special in shorter length cables however if you are running a connection more than 12 feet I would recommend thinking about getting a gold plated cable. The reason for this is analog signals can degrade over a cable, and having a gold plated connection means your signal will stay stronger over a longer length of cable.

Component Cable

Not to be out done by the Composite Cable, a Component Cable offers three cables for your video signal. Each cable is for each color channel (red green and blue) and if you forget to plug a cable in or the cable isn’t plugged in all the way your picture will still show up however you will be missing a color channel which will make the TV look very awkward. This was something that threw me off before as well, I wasn’t sure why the TV was displaying such an odd color and then I realized the green cable was not plugged in all the way. Now again the cable colors do not matter, if you feel like plugging the red color cable into the blue input, more power to you. However it helps you out a lot so you know you are plugging the cable in correctly. With these I also recommend gold plated cables at a longer length of cable however if it is short there isn’t a real need to go gold plated.

HDMI Cable

Ahhh the beloved HDMI Cable. These cables are something I’d like to call amazing. They can take a crappy picture and make it look gorgeous. They give you so much more detail, honestly if your TV has HDMI inputs you are stupid for not using them. These cables send out a digital signal, which means you don’t need anything fancy because either your signal will get there or it wont. The cable transmits a bunch of 1′s and 0′s across the cable where it’s then read by your TV to create your picture. Now either your binary numbers will get there or they wont, there is no possible way to make a 1 look any better than it already does. For this reason never buy a gold plated HDMI cable. Actually never buy a HDMI cable that costs more than $12 unless it’s a longer length of cable. Some HDMI cables will support a higher bandwidth and blah blah blah, but the only thing you need to know is that your local retailer can buy those cables for $6 and then resell them for $50+ and you can buy a $6 HDMI cable and it will work just the same as that $50+ cable. HDMI will run both your video and audio channels so you don’t have worry about needing more than 1 cable per source in most cases.

So where am I going with this?

Basically don’t let the store you are shopping at fool you. Gold plated is an alright investment if you are running anything except for HDMI. However once you get into the HDMI arena it’s a whole new game. I’ve had my supervisor try to tell me about how HDMI benefits from gold plating, and honestly the only benefit you would have is the cable might last longer. It might be more durable, but as far as giving you a better picture, it will not. You’d have to go through at least 3 cheap cables before buying that gold plated cable would make sense, and that’s if the cable was at the cheap $30 mark for a gold plated HDMI cable. Retail stores make more money from selling you a cable than they do from selling the TV in most cases, that’s why they push to sell cables so much.

Oh just in case you were wondering what the “Monster Difference” was, here it is:

In case you can’t tell the TV displaying the Monster Cable is using an HDMI cable. The TV displaying the “HDMI” cable that isn’t a Monster cable is using that cheap and crappy composite cable. Food for thought, hope this article helps you out!