HDMI & Cable Run Choice

Grant's Perspective on ... the importance of quality cables and the distance they can effectively carry a signal.

At InfoComm, Kramer was demonstrating the importance of cable choice when using HDMI twisted pair products. Their demonstration showed:

·         Standard CAT5e was only good to just over 100ft. @ 1080P

·         Good quality CAT6 shielded was good to about 150ft. @ 1080P

·         Kramer BC-DGKat623 cable was good to 285ft. @ 1080P

All cables were fed signal from the same HDMI twisted pair transmitter (Kramer PT-571) and receiver (PT-572) set, which were fed from the same Blu-ray player to the same display. The only variable was the cable. The BC-DGKat623 cable uses individually shielded pairs, a larger gauge size (23 AWG) than standard CAT5e or CAT6, and was developed specifically for transmitting digital signals (pictured below). Cable choice with twisted pair digital signals is much more crucial than it is with analog, where standard CAT5e works just fine.

Thank you to Richard from Kramer Canada pictured above at InfoComm, for helping remind me of the technical details for this post.

Grant