It is true to say that HDMI is a confusing subject for the consumer. There is such an expanse of conflicting information out there that it is difficult to sort the real life genuine stuff from the ‘smoke & mirrors’ marketing mumbo jumbo misleading stuff.

More importantly from the consumer’s perspective it is incredibly difficult, pretty much impossible to know for certain (especially where long cable lengths are concerned), that the cable will work with their equipment at the required distance before making the purchase decision. Substantially more difficult for the consumer to know is whether the cable will not only work with today's equipment, but whether it will be ‘future-proofed’ sufficiently so that it is capable of working with the equipment likely to be on the market in the future.

Quite frankly, the 1080i satellite content being provided from your receiver today could quite easily become upgraded to a 1080p 16-bit (or better) resolution in just a few years time. So sure, you as a conscientious consumer and savvy buyer wants to be safe in the knowledge that when these resolution upgrades take place and the data demands on your cabling increase three-fold, your set-up can handle it!

A convenient myth… 1080p certification

If one shops around for HDMI cables, you will find many cables said to be “certified for 1080p”. We ourselves get a lot of questions from potential customers asking exactly that; “are your cables 1080p certified?” the marketplace has ingrained and deep-rooted into the consumer that this is an important factor and feature to look out for, hoodwinked them into this erroneous concept. The real world answer to their question is that there is no such thing as official 1080p certification, The HDMI Authority does not certify cable performance this way, no manufacturer’s or brand of HDMI cable can be certified officially for 1080p, ours aren’t, absolutely no one’s are.

What does Official HDMI Certification really amount to?

HDMI certification is basically a test exam for HDMI cables. A cable is tested at an authorised test centre, of which there is only a handful in the world, using highly specialized sensitive testing apparatus. If it passes the test to a certain standard it will be awarded a compliancy certificate with a grade of either Cat1 or Cat2.

Lets look at HDMI 1.3 specification. It is important to note that the HDMI specification applies to the interface as a whole, not the cable. A cable can only be tested to see whether it is  theoretically compliant to work with HDMI supported devices that meet that specification version. Technically speaking no such thing as a HDMI 1.0, 1.2 or 1.3 cable, any cable marked as such is marked incorrectly; likewise they should not be marked as 720p or 1080p, that would also be incorrect.

There are two layers of compliance testing possible; a lower grade - ‘Category 1’ the equivalent to 720p or 1080i resolutions and a higher grade called ‘Category 2’, a much higher data handling (bandwidth) specification – not as easily attributable to a resolution equivalent as I will go on to explain.

Unlike Cat1, the ‘Category 2” compliance testing criteria does not correspond neatly to the common resolutions, or potential future resolutions and colour depth bitrates (ie. 1080p 8-bit, 1080p 12-bit Deep Colour etc). An eye-pattern test is run at 1.65Gbps and 3.4Gbps, with the latter rate run through a reference "equalizer" formula that corrects some of the signal degradation. The Category 2 test's 1.65Gbps rate exceeds the 1.485Gbps rate of 1080p 60hz 8-bit colour, so although it isn't really a 1080p test, it should at least guarantee a cable’s performance at 1080p 8-bit but not necessarily higher colour depth bitrates. It is easily to see now why even Cat2 certification is not ideal and can only offer ambiguous assumptions of a cables performance over 1080p at best. More crucially, this test would need to be run for every cable length in the range and an individual certification produced for each length. As we have just explained, even then it only really proves guaranteed performance at 1080p 8-bit.

Conclusion

Certification can only really prove one thing really. And that is that the particular cable length used in the compliancy testing apparatus theoretically can pass a 1080p 8-bit signal for definite and possibly beyond. That certificate can only speak on behalf of that lonesome unique cable that was used in the test. It cannot represent compliancy on behalf of all the other HDMI cable ranges from that manufacturer and it certainly cannot represent compliancy at any length above that of the cable used in the test.

So, what can I look out for and trust when buying a HDMI cable?

Unfortunately for the consumer, a claim of being ‘certified’ just doesn’t really cut the mustard. Independent views and opinions from people not related to the company are always good quality-indicators of a company’s products and service, so look out for good customer feedback and good customer product reviews. In the world of HDMI, real-world testing done by both the customer and the company is really the ultimate acid test for products. At HDCable.co.uk we ‘real-world test’ all of our cable ranges in varying lengths as extensively as possible. We test all our products out with a wide selection of different HD device manufacturers in real-world set-up scenarios so we can be sure of maximum compatibility and we can be confident in all of our product’s real-world performance claims. Also, look for suppliers who offer lifetime guarantees, even better look for a supplier with a lifetime satisfaction guarantee such as ours, that way you can have peace of mind that the supplier is truly confident in the quality of their product and should there ever be future problems they will be solved quickly and at no additional cost to you!