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Comment by aaron465 | Hacker News Reader

HDMI cables too!

As a techie who understands that there are many different types of USB-C and HDMI cables depending on what you need to use it for, it's an incredible amount of effort to find the right thing to buy.

When you consider that most brick and mortar stores (I'm looking at you, Currys PC World) massively rip you off with £100+ gold plated HDMI cables, and the search results on Amazon are filled with knock-off Nigel rubbish (or worse, listings that out-right lie to you)... it's a total minefield!

Imagine what it's like for the average consumer! A complete disaster!

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Especially tedious on Amazon when you have a seller list the same cable in various lengths. The reviews are all commingled, so you'll get plenty of valid five star reviews for the short cables while the long ones don't support the bandwidth.

And who knows how many reviews are from non-techies who are just getting a picture on the screen and leave a five star review without knowing / caring if they actually got HDR or not.

This would be difficult with HDMI cables – unlike USB-C, they’re not electronically marked.

Only HDMI 2.1 introduced link training (before that it was just the source picking a resolution that the sink supports and hoping for the best!), but even that is an end-to-end thing; the cable is not part of the conversation, so you wouldn’t know if the cable is bad or the socket/internal wiring beyond the cable on either side.

Most (all? But I’d have to double check) of my hdmi cables have the version printed on the cable jacket. Seems entirely sensible to do.

All but one of mine. The one has a plastic braid "protecting" the cable, which hides any potentially useful markings.

I just had to go through the "do I have any good HDMI cables" dance, and the answer was effectively no.

Oh, sorry, I thought this was in the sub thread about “why not mark cables in software”!

Fully agreed – the maximum supported data rate would be even more important to be printed on the cable for HDMI.

One reason I could see why manufacturers would be hesitant to do this is that some future improvements might not have higher requirements for cabling, so the printed data rate might be underselling actual capabilities.

As a consumer I'd much rather have a cable rated for one level and end up actually supporting more than not having any information at all.

I just checked the 4 HDMI cables plugged into my TV and not a single one had the version printed on it

The closest was one that said "High Speed HDMI cable with ethernet" but I'm not sure what "high speed" is supposed to mean

Monoprice is where it's at for cables. I've never went wrong with them and always get what I want.

I personally prefer the aesthetics of the white Amazon Basics [0] and/or Infinite Cables [1] hdmi 2.1b [2] 48gbps cables, but as long as they're certified and pass the totalphase cable test I guess it doesn't really matter

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BS181P2

[1]: https://us.infinitecables.com/products/ultra-high-speed-hdmi...

[2]: https://www.hdmi.org/spec21sub/ultrahighspeedcable

I hooked up a new monitor and had the hardest time trying to figure out why things weren't working. Finally swapped the HDMI cable and it worked perfectly. Gah.

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