How long cable hdmi

Cable Matters sells a wide variety of options in that category. Whichever one you opt for though, 25ft is about the maximum length you can use without seeing a degradation in signal quality due to attenuation. Although passive HDMI cables can support distances more than twice that in theory, the environment would need to be practically perfect to not experience severe negative consequences of such a long cable without some sort of active power to counteract the signal degradation.

If you're looking to hook up ceiling-mounted projectors or building a home movie theatre with the media stored far from the eventual display, you'll need a relatively lengthy and hefty HDMI cable for the job.

That's where you'll run into problems with standard, low-cost HDMI cables. Instead, you want to use something like the active fiber optic HDMI cable. It supports HDMI 2.

These cables are light and flexible, making them a great choice for getting to hard to reach places. Once you reach extreme ranges in the multiple hundreds of feet, a singular cable just isn't going to cut it.

You'll see weakened signals causing instability and screen flashing, alongside other image degradations. However, at a certain point wire gauge becomes too thick to be useful. HDMI extenders can solve that problem. In theory, extenders based on optical fiber technology can extend an HDMI signal to almost 1, feet, but it's not typically recommended unless in extreme scenarios where no other options are available.

You don't need to be concerned about a loss of features or quality over more reasonable distances, though. Like many audio, video, and data cables, HDMI cords can suffer from signal degradation at longer lengths—50 feet is generally considered the maximum reliable length. And it's rare to see an HDMI cable longer than 25 feet in a store. Even online, cables more than 50 feet long can be hard to find. If your TV, set-top box, and other AV equipment are all on the same piece of furniture, this isn't much of a concern.

With a collocated setup, you'll probably never need more than 6 feet of cable at a time. But HDTVs have introduced a whole new way of arranging home theater gear. Flat screens are increasingly thin and lightweight, and their picture-frame profiles make them perfect for hanging on walls. Similarly, HD home theater digital projectors are now affordable enough for non-gazillionaires to set up a basement cinema.

A clean installation of either of those setups generally requires a bit of in-wall wiring, sometimes even from one room—an AV closet, for instance—to another.

And when you're fishing wires up into ceilings, over doors and under floors, the necessary spool of cable gets long quickly. Here are the alternatives. Since you can't terminate HDMI wires yourself, look for wall plates with an internal female connector.

The hardest thing to get right in HDMI cable is high-frequency performance, and so generally speaking, the lower the cable quality, the more the working distance will fall as resolution or color depth rises.

Another factor in these distances is the headroom provided by both the source and the display. Obviously, if the source signal isn't very good, or the display's data-recovery characteristics aren't very good, or the input or output impedances are meaningfully off-spec, then distances will be more limited than if these things are all performing well above spec.

This is one of the maddening things about HDMI: it's not really possible to say with perfect confidence that a long cable will or will not work in a given application because once one is in "non-compliant" territory, it all depends upon the characteristics of the devices in use. It's not uncommon, with long cables, to find that they work with one source or display and not with another.

In practical terms, today, for distances 50 feet and shorter, even economical HDMI cables are usually reliable at p, i and though this is less consistently so p. For very short runs--all those 3 and 6 foot cables out there in the world, at least when not being used as part of a much longer signal chain--it's best not to worry about it at all.

But for those long runs, the future is still very unclear. Low-cost foot cables which are near their performance limit at p today may not work with bit color p tomorrow.

If you're in the longer-thanfoot category, it gets dicier. However, wireless HDMI kits like this one are very expensive. While these two methods can easily give you better signal transmission, you have to gauge if they are worth it. If you really have to transmit through a long distance, then look for a kit that is both affordable and durable. Overall, the consensus for the optimal length of an HDMI cable is 20 feet.

If you need a cable longer than that, you can go for either an HDMI signal converter or a wireless kit. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

July 10, Lisa Hayden. You may also like. October 31, October 27,