Since my son Eric has gone to college, and taken his Sony PS3 with him, I didn’t have any way to watch Blu-Ray movies any more. While Christmas shopping, I realized that Walmart had quite a few Blu-Ray movies priced as low as $8 each, nearly the same price for the same movie on DVD. I decided that it was time to buy a Blu-Ray player. After reading a few reviews, and shopping around a bit, I found a decent deal on a Sony BDP-S370 on sale at Sears. When I hooked it up, I realized that I was going to need another HDMI cable to get the full resolution. I had my previous DVD player hooked up using a Component Video cable, but that seems to only support up to 1080i, not 1080p that I can get using HDMI.
I checked the prices on the HDMI cables at Walmart when I picked up a few Blu-Ray movies, and found their best deal was a 6-foot HDMI cable from Vizio for $28.
Instead, I’ve ordered online from Monoprice. They have 6-foot HDMI cables for about $3 each. So I ordered 4 of them, in different colors, so that I can tell them apart when I hook things up. I also found they had a Component Video cable for Melissa’s WII for about $3.30, and one with Composite and S-Video for $2.72. Even with the $7.75 or so for shipping, the total for the order came to only $26.
So I saved a couple of bucks over Walmart’s cheapest price, but I’m getting 6 cables instead of one! I’ll have a couple of extra HDMI cables, and a hookup for the WII on each TV so we don’t have to unplug and move the cable when we want to move the WII.
Monoprice is the only vendor that I’ve found that sells quality cables, for the price that cables should actually cost. Most cable is less than .50/foot, and connectors shouldn’t amount to more that .50-1 apiece, so it shouldn’t cost more than a buck for a USB cable, or $5 for an HDMI cable. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I walk through Best Buy and see HDMI cables for $50 or more!
Please, save yourself some of your hard-earned money, and order your cables online!