Printer connections

[Brian McIntosh]

I had to go to my local computer shop today to buy a longer USB printer cable. There was quite a selection and I ended up buying one of the cheaper ones. What struck me though was the difference in price between the "normal" cables and the ones with gold plated connections. If the cable is only transferrind data, does the gold plating make the data more "pure" or is it just a marketing gimmick to fool all of us IT luddites?

 

[Gordon N]

You can probably answer that question yourself Brian, did the cable work?

 

[Brian McIntosh]

Well, that's exactly what I thought Gordon. Plugged it in, pressed print, away it goes. I just don't get the gold plated thing. Maybe it's just me. Maybe I should worry about real things.

 

[Scottish Business Owner]

I'm no science geek but doesn't the gold plating conduct better with electricity? I might be completely wrong and to be honest due to the difference in price i've never bought one although my big tv did come with one. Dont see much difference myself!

 

[visagephoto]

As you say , the gold connections are claimed to conduct a better, cleaner signal, I seem to remember that gold connectors were initially supplied with cables intended originally for audio/video use.

Perhaps this is where the benefit of gold connectors are more noticeable.

 

[Brian McIntosh]

That's the reason I asked Alan. I had gold plated connections on some speaker cables I had years ago and they made a difference to the sound. When the output is something you can hold i.e. a print, I can't see the difference gold plating would make.

 

[visagephoto]

That's the reason I asked Alan. I had gold plated connections on some speaker cables I had years ago and they made a difference to the sound. When the output is something you can hold i.e. a print, I can't see the difference gold plating would make.

Yes I would agree Brian!

As stated in your OP. it's most likely a marketing ploy to bump the price up, after all would there really be much benefit from plugging gold plated leads into non gold plated sockets?

Might try offering my clients "High definition prints", ie. printed using Gold plated leads.

 

[Brian McIntosh]

What a fantastic idea. Let me know how it goes :tongue_smilie:.

 

[shredder]

I can understand the argument for better quality connections with gold for analogue connections - e.g. in speakers but outputting to a printer is digital - it either works or it doesn't - a better quality 1 or 0 does not make a difference. Reminds me of the saying "There are only 10 types of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don't"

 

[stuarty]

Right...I wasn't going to enter this thread but before I moved into programmking and web stuff I graduated in electronics/maths and worked in the industry for a few years in semiconductor fabrication. (I was aprocess engineer) 1's and 0s are actually analog signals. the digital "step" as we know it in graphs don't go instantaeously from 0 to 5v a 5v to 0v in zero time. It still takes a fractio of a microsecond to get up and down. Didital signals still have noise and attenuate over loger distances. There are things called deattenuators over long lines that boost signals. So that's why there are gold bits on them for long distances. But you're all correct it's just a load of marketing crap to make more money. Makes no difference to the quality so save your pennies

I hope this makes sense in the morning. Goodnight

 

[stugster]

The other thing to remember is this: Although the signal on the line is technically analog, the data when it is received is still digital. Meaning if there has been corruption along the way and the checksum doesn't match, the printer will just ask the host computer to re-send the data again. It's not like your analogue TV where receiving a poor signal results in a rubbish signal.

Look at Digital TV as a prime example. When you have a poor signal, you get catastrophic failure in the parts where signal was dropped (either sound, or the squares that make up the picture). In this example of TV though, the television doesn't request for the retransmission of the data because it's a live streaming medium and by that time, the programme has moved on.

 

[GeorgeKing]

Go with the cheap one. The gadget show on ch5 did a similar test with 3 HDMI cables last year. There was no difference between the cheapy at something like a tenner vs the "premium gold plated etc." cable at something crazy like £80.