ebay is by far the best place for cables.

On a good day you can find some at Princess Auto in Dartmouth fairly cheap.

yes i did read all the reviews.
come over to my house ill show ya. i got monster hdmi 400 and 800 and regular hdmi cable. all give a slightly better signal

"slightly better quality" is a little different then the "BIIIIIG" difference you originaly stated.i have worked with home theatre equipment for abou 8 years and i can tell you that a decent generic cable will give you same quality siginal. the monster cables are a suckers game. my buddy works at futureshop and they pay about $20 for a $150 monster hdmi cable lol.

best cables you can get are usually custom made, theres a company that dies it in dartmouth, i think they run a little bit more then a genereric but there amazing quality.

With a digital signal I fail to see how cable quality will matter much since it's either a 1 or a 0 and will either work or not work. If a bad quality cable is causing the digital filter on the device to see a 1 as a 0 (or vice versa) then yes there would be a problem but from all the tests I've seen even the regular (cheap) cables produce 100% accuracy so why spend more? It's not like Monster Cables are 110% accurate or anything.

When it comes to analog signals, then yes, cable quality is very important and I would totally agree that a difference should be visible/audible.

its signal strength, and durability. but like as said before unless there garbage cables you will get similar results wit $50 that you would with $300.

u do not know anything about hdmi cables if u make that statement.
lol

http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,12177 ... icle.html#

Choice Quotes:

"One obstacle we did face involved establishing solid connections with our devices' HDMI ports. In some cases, we connected the cable but no image appeared. Sometimes wiggling the cable fixed the problem, and sometimes it didn't. But the trouble seems to stem from the the standard HDMI connector design used by all cable vendors."

Which ironically leads to:

"In our tests, we had the most trouble when trying to attach Monster's $300 M1000HDMI cable to the Epson's HDMI port. Easily the thickest, stiffest, heaviest model we reviewed, the Monster cable pulled away from the projector's HDMI port, often causing the screen to go blank."

And finally:

"Once you get a good HDMI connection, our tests indicate, you can expect flawless performance from any 4-meter cable, regardless of price."

To sum it all up:

"For its part, digital carries just ones and zeros. In HDMI, if the signal voltage is high, it encodes a one; if low, a zero. The voltage encoded as a one can drop a fair amount and still be distinguishable from voltage encoded as a zero. After a certain point, however, the signal voltage drops so low that ones and zeros look alike, and the TV's receiver chip attempts to guess their value. So rather than gradually diminishing in accuracy, the way an analog signal does, a digital signal may remain perfect up to a critical level and then fail catastrophically."

So, basically it either works flawlessly (100% accuracy) or it noticeable fails. There is little to no "grey area" when it comes to quality of these digital signals.

*EDIT*

I just found a site that does claim there is a difference in signal quality and rates cables based on it:

http://www.avreview.co.uk/news/article/ ... 70/v/1/sp/

Too bad the only comment on their review is this:

"HDMI cables carry only digital signals.

Suggesting a difference in picture quality with different cables is bogus and depreciates the review. Either the signal is decoded at the other end (picture) or it isn't (no picture). If the signal quality was right on the cusp, a TV may attempt to display an incorrectly decoded picture but this would be very obvious (broken images etc.) rather than a subtle change of hue or loss of sharpness.

HDMI 1.3 specifies two categories of cable, category 1 (standard TV and HDTV) and category 2 (above HDTV). No mention is made of this.

To my mind, testing would have included these criteria:

Able to carry 1080P
Compatibility with various equipment
Quality of build, e.g. flexibility, ..."

*Edit 2*

I didn't see the "More" button at the bottom of the post but there is a long discussion there about this topic. Marketplace did an episode on this and from what I remember the signal analyzer could not see any difference between sent and received signals during their testing. Maybe the placebo effect is coming into play here???

i dunno what they say. come over to my place i will show you the difference. i can see it. u can see it. my cat can see it. probably even my fish can see it.
either that or my "cheep" hdmi cable is really crap.
its a standard one bought from mysterybyte. and i have a monster cable one not sure if its 400 800 or 1000 tho

and apparently most a/v experts give the same opinion as mine but i suppose your knowledge is just far superior to theres.

has nohting to do with knoledge. its called "see it for your self"
lol
and yer an expert now are ya. lol
j/k its all in good fun guys. but seriously. come over and i will show you. there is a difference between MY cheep hdmi cable and MY expensive hdmi cable. whatever the experts say or u say. or the queen of phuckin england says. anyone can clearly see a major difference

rite now i got my pc hooked up to my computer with MY CHEEP HDMI CABLE. the signal is abit fuzzy rez 1360x768 any higher rez it gets fuzzier.
ok give me a min here

now i have hooked up my EXPENSIVE hdmi cable from my tv to my computer and the signal at 1360x768 is much clearer. i can acthually define pixels when im up close to the tv.

NOW AM I RETARDED OR SEEING THINGS.
OR AM I RIGHT.2 people sitting in my living room see the difference aswell.
lol

The only thing I can think of right now is that your TV is somehow dropping information while filtering the signal it's getting - if they can even do that. The better the cable quality and the better the video source is at sending the signal the clearer your TV will receive it but the signal will always have to be filtered and as long as a 1 still reads as a 1 and the 0 still a 0 it shouldn't make a difference. If the filter somehow takes longer to read a weak signal and then your TV somehow takes this into consideration and lowers the resolution on the fly (two very big "if's") then I suppose it could be possible but then the problem would also be partially blamed on the TV and not just the cable itself.