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Question Do HDMI cables wear well?

mikeymikec

mikeymikec

Lifer
I have a 3-metre long HDMI cable that I've typically used to connect my laptop to the TV, so the cable gets unplugged and tidied maybe a couple of times a month, but I was surprised when it evidently died recently. I used it to test my desktop PC with a second display and dmesg said that it had no EDID data; initially I thought it might have been Linux / my graphics card being pernickety but when I then tried it in its usual role (laptop + TV), it didn't do anything there either and a spare cable worked. The spare cable also worked for my desktop and the second screen test.

Admittedly I don't recall the full history of this cable, maybe it came second-hand from a customer for example, but I'm curious to know whether there are many people with experiences here of HDMI cables (perhaps ones that aren't just connected once and left alone) dying.

The cable only needed to do 1080p in either case, nothing special there. There's half a chance that my PC might have wanted to do 75Hz refresh (as that's what my main screen is set to do), but I doubt it.
 
I had an HDMI cable that I used to carry with me for a PS4 when I went out of town. It was a nice braided and I made sure to coil it up neatly after each use and store it in a backpack with the PS4. I was really surprised one day when it quit working. Not sure what failed on it nor why it failed. It maybe got used 50 times.
 
Too many wires of too high a gauge in order to fit in a thin, flexible cable... yeah they fail, particularly the more they're moved around.

Reduce wire gauge to result in thicker/heavier cables and then it puts more stress on the HDMI sockets. Even worse when it's mHDMI. I was never a fan of connector-shrink except when absolutely necessary.

I always shake my head when I see the cable manufacturer packaging, or owner, contorting the cable for storage with sharp bends at both ends of the bundle like pictured below, instead of looping it in a circle.
 

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I thought I had a second HDMI cable fail this evening (same laptop, same TV), but since I pulled out a spare laptop which handled the connection fine, I'm suspecting my Broadwell-era laptop of not being a good match for Win11. It's odd though because I've used it for this purpose many times and it's only recently that it's started to play up in this fashion; I suspect it's the graphics driver because sometimes when the laptop comes out of sleep mode, the screen flickers (which it has done for a while now). I'm loathe to knock it back down to Win10 as it's been my Win11 "officially unsupported" test machine for a while now, but I guess it has more roles to play than this.

After testing with the spare laptop, I tried mine again and while it would recognise the TV and the TV's basic specs, it seemingly refused to transmit anything other than a blank (though on) screen to the TV. I've got whatever is the most recent driver for it already.

I'm still sure about the first cable though.
 
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