Old cables, new, and HDMI puzzles

Recently I was using a 3D full HD front projector, and I was pleased to find that my old 10 metre Kordz ‘Diamond’ HDMI cable worked fine with it, including with full Blu-ray 3D. Then a few days later I switched out the receiver I was using for a different one, and suddenly there was no more 3D*, although all other HDMI video formats were working, including 1080p24 and 1080p60. This last requires significantly more bandwidth than 3D (which requires about the equivalent of 1080p48). I fiddled around with cables and found that I could get this working using a 5 metre Kordz ‘Diamond’. But this required some rather precarious stringing across my office, so I sought a new ten metre cable.

I settled on the 10 metre Kordz EVX. This has a ribbon form which makes it far more manageable.

But when I put the new EVX in place, it didn’t work in 3D! For a moment. The 5m ‘Diamond’ I had been using was plugged into HDMI 2 on the projector, so I switched the new cable to HDMI 2, and it worked there fine. Further experimentation revealed that for some reason HDMI 1 on the projector worked fine with all signals, except 24p(fp) (frame packed — ie. Blu-ray 3D format). That included normal 1080p24 and 1080p60. But HDMI 2 worked with all signals including Blu-ray 3D. And it worked with both the old Diamond and the new EVX cable.

Nothing in the projector manual about it, so goodness knows what’s going on.

 


 

* What do I mean by ‘no more 3D’? That could mean that a 2D signal was coming through, or it could mean that no signal was coming through. It was the latter. That suggests that the other components — the receiver and the Blu-ray player — thought that all was fine on the 3D front, and therefore continued passing through the 3D signal, but for some reason it wasn’t being received by the projector.

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