I really am curious about this, as I'm looking to upgrade my home theater soon. Can you (or anybody) actually give me any concrete details about what makes these 5x more expensive devices better?
TrentD suggested that these cheap versions will be uncertified and have worse compatibility, but both products I link do say they are fully HDMI 1.3(a/b) certified. I don't know what the certification process entails, but I'd assume being 1.3a certified would imply compatibility with all 1.3a and earlier devices, and a proven capability to properly transmit the full bandwidth of the signal. I'm not sure what could go wrong when splitting/transmitting a digital signal...but I've still got no concrete reason why the devices Engadget has posted are better at doing so.
With a TV, I can understand the difference between a cheap and an expensive set: there are specs like "contrast ratio," "pixel response time" and "color accuracy" to care about....what can really be wrong with a fully certified switch box for HDMI signals? Is it possible for a certified device to mess up the digital signal somehow, and still be "certified"?
I guess you can complain about grammar on the website...but a re-seller with a lazy website doesn't imply lousy products. I've seen plenty of misspellings on the store-printed labels for products at all types of brick-and-mortar shops...that doesn't mean the products are crap.
Even if service from the website was lousy -- is that worth a 5x price premium?
Anybody able to tell me something specific about why these 5x more expensive products are actually better, if indeed they are?
“An engineer explained to us that hundreds of ear impressions were gathered in the name of research, and while each one obviously boasted its own unique shape and size, one single characteristic remained uniform across the board: the entrance into the ear canal is not a perfect circle, it's an oval.”
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I really am curious about this, as I'm looking to upgrade my home theater soon. Can you (or anybody) actually give me any concrete details about what makes these 5x more expensive devices better?
TrentD suggested that these cheap versions will be uncertified and have worse compatibility, but both products I link do say they are fully HDMI 1.3(a/b) certified. I don't know what the certification process entails, but I'd assume being 1.3a certified would imply compatibility with all 1.3a and earlier devices, and a proven capability to properly transmit the full bandwidth of the signal. I'm not sure what could go wrong when splitting/transmitting a digital signal...but I've still got no concrete reason why the devices Engadget has posted are better at doing so.
With a TV, I can understand the difference between a cheap and an expensive set: there are specs like "contrast ratio," "pixel response time" and "color accuracy" to care about....what can really be wrong with a fully certified switch box for HDMI signals? Is it possible for a certified device to mess up the digital signal somehow, and still be "certified"?
I guess you can complain about grammar on the website...but a re-seller with a lazy website doesn't imply lousy products. I've seen plenty of misspellings on the store-printed labels for products at all types of brick-and-mortar shops...that doesn't mean the products are crap.
Even if service from the website was lousy -- is that worth a 5x price premium?
Anybody able to tell me something specific about why these 5x more expensive products are actually better, if indeed they are?