A small but significant development at CEDIA: Affordable long run Digital Cables (1 Viewer)

We saw a lot at CEDIA 2005 and will be talking about it on these pages, but some of the best stuff, to my way of thinking, came from some of the smaller booths. One such example I came across at the ACCELL booth. They announced a new line of long HDMI and DVI cables and you can see some of their products here. Note: I'm not saying that ACCELL is the only manufacturer offering long digital cables but this is just a starting point.

In the past digital cables longer than 10 or 15 feet required other considerations to boost the signal and were generally very, very expensive. Now with new technologies you can get cables over 100 feet without significant signal loss. And why am I so excited about this? My present HT configuration has a projector (with digital input) up on the ceiling and the electronics far enough away to make a 10-15' cable impossible to use. In fact it will take at least a 60' run to get a digital signal from my electronics to my projector without the wires being intrusive. I suspect there are many others with the same cable length issues and these new long cables open up the digital world to us. Using a proper scaler, you can have a one cable video solution.

Scalers are also getting better (I was suitably impress with DVDO's upcoming iScanVP30 to consider it for my scaling and switching needs.) There is information about it here. While not cheap at a little under $2K it offers a lot of flexibility for the money.

So with longer digital cables now reaching the market at reduced prices, those with Front Projectors have more digital options than before if your equipment placement is limited.

As an addenda to my comments earlier, I decided to test one of these ACCELL cables on a trial basis recently in my HT to see if they delivered what they promised. I'm happy to report that they appear to work very well.

The particulars:

My Home Theater requires at least a 50 foot run to get a digital signal from my electronics in the front of the room to the projector on the ceiling so that the wires are not visible. Up until this point I was limited by 10-15' lengths of digital cables generally available so this was not an option and I was feeding my HD signal from my Dish HD receiver (Model #921) to my projector (Runco CL-710) via component leads. Since a digital cable would reduce the amount of conversion from digital to analog (via component cables) and then back again it would stand to reason that you have a better chance of maintaining the integrity of the digital source if a digital pathway could be established. In addition, as more digital source materials are on the horizon I will shortly be adding an HD digital processor/hub (The DVDO iScan VP30) to my arsenal and a digital cable to the projector becomes an integral part of this taking place.

My greatest fear was that the long cable length would degrade the digital signal but I can now report that this did not happen. Not only is the HD picture excellent using this cable (22 meters long) but it's better than what I was getting from the analog cable where length is not as critical. My Runco/Dish Receiver setup required that I use a couple of adapters on each end (the cables were HDMI to HDMI and the devices are DVI) and the tight quarters of the Runco projector made me use some additional cable to get enough elbow room for the connection. But even with these extra connectors, the digital signal was not compromised. I will definitely be purchasing this cable and am now ready for the digital signal revolution.