Originally Posted by Steerpike (Post 7206090)

Blue-ray is to DVD what High Def. 'broadcast' TV is to regular TV; and since you don't have a High Def TV signal at your house, this is probably a meaningless comparison! :) . A blue ray DVD holds up to 50 gig of data, compared to 8 gig for a DVD. That translates to more 'bits of information', and thus, more potential visual quality. The important point is, it DOES make a difference.

We first bought an HDTV (37") but did not get an HD source, and we thought it was awful (regular TV actually looks WORSE on a large flat-screen than it does on a CRT tube TV). I finally broke down and signed up for Comcast's HD source, and the difference was stunning - truly stunning. Nowadays, we hardly ever watch DVDs on the HDTV, because the quality is so noticeably inferior to the quality of the HD programming. I'm in the market now for a BlueRay player, and will gradually build up a library of Blue Ray disks.


I'm not going to suggest that the cheap cables don't work, and I'll be the first to echo the sentiment of 'buy cheap', but - it's a bit simplistic to argue that it will either 'work or not' "because it's digital". Have you ever had to deal with a defective 'ethernet' cable? I have ... they can work fine over short distances, but over longer distances (still 'in spec') problems can arise - nasty, odd problems that are hard to diagnose. It's true that, being 'digital', they will 'work or not work' at an instant in time, but the overall impact of a faulty cable can be dropouts, retries, etc that could manifest as picture problems. Same goes for faulty USB cables.

Typical modern 'Digital' cables work by sending very high-speed electrical signals across pairs of wires that are twisted and shielded very carefully. Crucial to the 'success' of this is that the pairs are well balanced, of equal length and resistance, etc, and do not 'leak' interference. The 'ends' of these cables is where the tricky stuff happens - each wire has to be carefully terminated at the 'plug', without un-twisting the pair or removing the shield by more than a very small amount. Cheap manufacturing processes can result in poor termination, and that can lead to poor performance of the cable.

Like I said - I have yet to encounter this in an HDMI cable, but I've most definitely encountered it in ethernet and USB cables.

Originally Posted by Duncan Roberts (Post 7204637)

My wife got mine for $204 including 6 movies. The movies were ones I wanted anyway and at the time the cost for them all was about $120. When she told me that I almost wept at the thriftiness!

Originally Posted by snowbunny (Post 7213786)

amazon.com ? ;)

I haven't been able to find a region hack for the 35k (for playback of SD DVDs). Which means keeping my Oppo DVD player as well. Many Blu-ray titles are regionless (no A, B, C crap) which is good.

Originally Posted by chartreuse (Post 7213243)

OK, fair enough. As somebody who floodwires every new house with CAT-5e, I appreciate the points you're making.

But I think we can agree that they really, really, don't need to be gold plated ;)

Originally Posted by Steerpike (Post 7214504)

Agree!

Do you stay within the ~290' limit for cat5e? Just curious.

I hate terminating wall sockets! Always grovelling on the floor behind some furniture or other ... I guess if you do it in a new house before moving in, you are ok. Just in case you aren't familiar (you prob. are but a surprising number of people aren't), it really matters how you 'pair up' the cables. You'd think, simplistically, that as long as you run 'pin 1 to pin 1', 'pin 2 to pin 2'', etc, that you'd be good to go. Well, it turns out, you will - on short runs. But if you start getting to the longer runs, you really need to ensure the PAIRS are handled correctly, with the key being that the two wires of a twisted pair must connect to pins 4 and 5, and the two wires of another twisted pair must connect to pins 3 and 6. Pins 1/2 and 7/8 are joined by the other two pairs.

I learned this when staging a user conference at a hotel. A guy on my team said he knew how to crimp ethernet cables, so I let him do it; his test cables in the office worked fine. At midnight the night before the conference started, workstations would not connect. In desperation, at 3am we called in a 'friend of a friend' to help, and he took one look at the cables, chopped off the ends, re-crimped appropriately, and everything worked! So I'll never forget this. The original guy had crimped pair 1 to 1/2; pair 2 to 3/4; pair 3 to 5/6; pair 4 to 7/8. The problem is, the 'send' and 'receive' signals run on pins 4/5 and 3/6, and to avoid interference those pairs have to be twisted. I would have bet $100 that this would not matter, prior to this experience :)