Other Inputs

One cable listed on this site has DisplayPort at one end and HDMI at the other. Its listing states a resolution and refresh combination well below the group of HDMI cables beside it, and that is the point: it is solving a different problem.

It is not a slower version of the same product. It is a way of getting a laptop that has no HDMI socket onto a screen that has nothing else.

That listing states the cable is uni-directional. It carries a signal one way, from the DisplayPort source to the HDMI display, and reversing the ends does not reverse the function.

Buying one for the opposite direction is the sort of mistake that looks like a faulty cable for an entire evening. Read which way the listing says it goes.

The length line on the cables page compares HDMI cables to each other. A cable with a different connector at one end is a different class of object, and putting it on the same line would imply a comparison that does not hold.

So it sits beside the line with its length stated on its card. The number exists; the comparison does not.

Before buying anything, count the inputs on the back of the display and write down what is already in each one. Rooms run out of sockets the same way they run out of outlets, and for the same reason: nobody counted.

While you are back there, note which sockets are hard to reach once the panel is on the wall. Those are the ones that should hold whatever never changes.

Every conversion in a chain is another connector, another set of contacts and another thing that can be blamed later. Two adapters in series turn a diagnosis into a process of elimination.

Where a single cable with the right ends exists, it beats an ordinary cable plus a dongle, for reasons that have nothing to do with picture quality and everything to do with the evening you spend when it stops working.