Stop it! Seriously. It sickens me when friends and family tell me how much they’re paying for cables at retail. Best Buy, Circuit City, and even Radio Shack are sticking it to consumers with profit margins that must exceed 80%.
Obviously we can’t stop buying cables, but we can be more choosy in who we patronize. If you have the patience to wait a few days for delivery, the best deals are (not-surprisingly) online. The other benefit of buying online is there are far more options in terms of connections and cable length. For example, I couldn’t just drive down to my local Tweeter for the 35′ HD15 -> Component cable I needed to feed my recently retired (sniff sniff) projector. Retailers like Amazon and Buy.com are much cheaper than the brick & mortars, but for the best deals look to specialized businesses.
In my experience, MonoPrice is currently the best of the bunch among lesser known vendors. Their prices are awesome and delivery is efficient. I recently purchased BOTH a 3′ HDMI cable and a 3′ DVI -> HDMI cable for UNDER $10. How can you beat that?
I concur – the monoprice cables are high quality and shipped quick!
I agree- I’ve purchased about 15 cables from monoprice- HDMI, DVI, component, toslink, optical, etc. No problems with any of them. And all for about $100.
80% margin?? You gotta be kidding. Common cables readily available online for under a buck often cost $25 at retail!
But aren’t Monster Cables better than the other options? ;-)
(Sorry, didn’t mean to drip sarcasm on you…)
Thanks for the tip! I’m about to purchase cables from Monoprice right now. Too bad you don’t have an affiliates account :).
I’ve been upset about this for a while. It used to be that Radio Shack for example had cheap cables that worked just fine. Now they mostly don’t have those anymore (except in the audio section), and they have substantial shelf space filled with Monster Cable’s ridiculous wares.
It would be nice to see somebody to a comparison test to see if there is ANY difference between the DIGITAL HDMI reproduction of an image over a cheap cable and a really expensive one. I can imagine cases (long runs maybe) where more expensive cable might make a difference with analog signals, but digital ones? Come on now…
Oh, should note that you can find cheap cables some places you might not expect, like at the local hardware store. In California, Orchard Supply Hardware stores carry a number of reasonably cheap cables. You won’t find them in all the lengths you might need, but if you just want something simple you might look here.