Which is a superior connection: Optical digital or HDMI?

[CRTGAMER]

Yeah just buy any old HDMI cable from ebay. People talking about signal degradation or poor quality signal are talking bollocks. It's a digital cable, it will only suffer from signal degradation over vast distances (EG I have a cheap £25 15m cable that suffers from no signal degradation whatsoever and that's a big 'ol cable too) I recently bought a £2.50 HDMI cable from ebay which works perfectly. Don't pay over the odds for HDMI cable they all do the exact same thing.

Same reasoning about the so called digital antennas for TV, no need for one. Digital will basically work or won't. You won't get color bleeding or snow like an analog cable or RF. As an example when U.S. went to digital, I tested the new reception with a digital receiver box for my portable TV. The older analog had a lot of snow where the newer digital would work crystal clear or not at all. Feel the same way about all those expensive Component cables when they first appeared, overkill.

[Niode]

Yeah just buy any old HDMI cable from ebay. People talking about signal degradation or poor quality signal are talking bollocks. It's a digital cable, it will only suffer from signal degradation over vast distances (EG I have a cheap £25 15m cable that suffers from no signal degradation whatsoever and that's a big 'ol cable too) I recently bought a £2.50 HDMI cable from ebay which works perfectly. Don't pay over the odds for HDMI cable they all do the exact same thing.

Same reasoning about the so called digital antennas for TV, no need for one. Digital will basically work or won't. You won't get color bleeding or snow like an analog cable or RF. As an example when U.S. went to digital, I tested the new reception with a digital receiver box for my portable TV. The older analog had a lot of snow where the newer digital would work crystal clear or not at all. Feel the same way about all those expensive Component cables when they first appeared, overkill.

That's not quite the same thing. Well, at least in this country DVB-T broadcasts on the UHF signal plane and old analogue aerials while still able to receive this broadcast the quality is massively degraded. We had an analogue aerial in the loft my current house but it was only able to receive a very limited amount of channels and was very prone to interference. Since upgrading to a digital high gain aerial we can receive all channels at near full signal strength (according to the signal strength and quality indicators on my TV).

[CRTGAMER]

Just showing an analogy that digital works or won't. Digital cable doesn't have to be the premium 50-100 dollar stuff to make a difference in signal. No crosstalk as in analog.