Ilda cable sources

[Bradfo69]

Basically, I just Google "MF DB25 cable" every once in awhile and see what pops up. Generally it's like www.cablestogo.com that pops up or some company like that See: http://www.cablestogo.com/product/02.../f%2050%20foot

I buy them randomly when I'm bored at work and feel like surfing for stuff and spending a little money. (Seriously!)

I've got tons of them from 1 foot to 100 foot and never had a problem with any of them. All but one of mine are beige that were purchased this way. I have a number of black ones that came from Lightspace with my Plutos in different lengths. Truth be told, the ones from Lightspace have nicer wire but cheaper connectors. They don't kink and stay nicely rolled up but, the hard plastic connectors tend to break.

I'm not so vain as to need to keep my cables on stage black. I guess that's not a bad idea though but, it never even occurred to me.

[Laserguy1]

http://www.l-com.com/d-sub-premium-m...-female-500-ft

L-Com has very nice high quality cables.

[tribble]

http://www.l-com.com/d-sub-premium-m...-female-500-ft

L-Com has very nice high quality cables.

That's a nice looking cable for sure, but is it really 4x better than a generic $15 beige cable?

Has anyone actually SEEN a difference between the image conveyed by a cheap cable vs. an expensive cable? I get all of the twisted pair, common mode noise rejection, etc. etc. theory; what I want to know is if anyone can actually distinguish between cables in a blind A/B test.

[Laserguy1]

Check your thickness, for longer cable runs you want fatter copper for lower loss of voltage, I have 100 percent voltage on a 50 foot L-Com 26 AWG premium cable and it has gold plated connectors to resist corrosion. All metal screws and head. You get what you pay for. Do you want an ILDA quality cable or a cheap Wal-Mart RS-232 cable? Not the same my friend.

[tribble]

Shame they don't have any black ones longer than 15' in stock. They don't mention twisted pairs so I imagine they are straight through like the other brands.

Voltage drop in cables is dependent on current draw. How much current does a differential receiver draw?

I seriously feel like I'm in audiophile speaker wire hell again...

[Lazerjock]

I just ordered a 50 footer from them. After shipping the total was $20.10 to Orlando, Fl. Wow!
I will try to remember to let you know the quality once I get it and try it out.

As for the color...I think a can of black spray paint will do the job and should hold up for a while. I know in the construction world they will spray paint extension cords to mark them.
You might get a scrape or scratch here or there, but who cares 99.9% is black.

Chris

http://www.monoprice.com/mobile/Cata...d=db25%20cable

Cant beat those prices

[Bradfo69]

I seriously feel like I'm in audiophile speaker wire hell again...

Yup! Been there. Again... something else to add to a "SELEM, test it out" experiment.

I'd be willing to buy a "high end" cable and set up an A/B comparison for people to see.

Laserguy1 - is that your best suggestion? http://www.l-com.com/d-sub-premium-m...-female-500-ft


Edit - Another thought... best as I know, FB3's and QM's don't have gold plated connectors. I've not seen a laser projector with a gold plated BD25 ILDA connector. I've not seen one in any splitter, UGC, console, etc. (I have on audio gear.) Is that really that important? If it were, wouldn't we see it more in laser related devices? Not trying to be argumentative.... Just playing devils advocate here. I've never seen corrosion on an ILDA cable. I think that's sometimes more of a marketing ploy than a real life advantage. (Yes, I'll admit I've experienced a difference with quality speaker cable though and have the $3+ per foot stuff.)

[carlos3621]

I just ordered a 50 footer from them. After shipping the total was $20.10 to Orlando, Fl. Wow!
I will try to remember to let you know the quality once I get it and try it out.

As for the color...I think a can of black spray paint will do the job and should hold up for a while. I know in the construction world they will spray paint extension cords to mark them.
You might get a scrape or scratch here or there, but who cares 99.9% is black.

Chris

i'vo got around 1000 feet total of DB25 cables ive purchased over the years,
some are cheap (monoprice)
some are better quality supposedly (cables2go.com)
some purchased from L-Com,

from my experience ALL WORK THE SAME, never had any noise issues with any of them (might have to do with the DB25 standard, dunno), but i'll never buy the more expensive one's ever again.
another note: these cables were origianlly designed for printers / etc. , so the only failure ive ever seen with any of my cables, is dented connectors from transportation, but easily just bent back to work fine.

[Lazerjock]

I got my $20 ILDA cable over the Christmas break and had a chance to try it out at a New Years Eve party. For the money I can't complain. It's very flexible and coils up easily. The ends are molded and the pins appear the be gold plated. At least they are colored gold. Lol. I saw no difference in image quality although I have to admit my projector isn't the best for this type of testing.

Over all for $20 shipped I think it is worth it.
Chris

[mixedgas]

If its shielded, not be twisted is less of a problem to 100 feet provided your using differential . Most cables have a slight inherent twist to make them flexible. As the cable pair capacitance gets closer to ~1000 picoFarads, the Op-Amp driving the cable will likely start to get unhappy. So if shielded well, has a decent wire size, and less then 100-200 feet, I doubt you'll see a difference in differential mode except for slight decrease in image size. There are always the club or industrial job that will prove me wrong. Such as the club in Cleveland with the large AM radio transmitter next door.

But for the most part one can assume 100 feet before one gets concerned.

Resistive and capacitive loss will start to shrink the maximum image size and high frequency content at some point. The quick test is to set up your projector, using a very short cable, mark the full field image on the distant wall (at least 10-20 feet) with a pencil. Then plug in the long cable and see how bad the drop is.


Quote from the Standards Book:

The source impedance shall be less than 1000 ohms; however, we
recommend that the source impedance be between 100 and 150 ohms. The
driver circuitry shall be capable of driving a capacitive load of 0.1
microfarads (equivalent to approx. 1000 feet of cable) without instability.
The driver circuitry shall be current-limited to lOOmA or less and shall
tolerate a short, or any potential within +1- 10 volts, to ground.

End Quote.

This means if your DAC has the 150 Ohm "Back Terminating" resistor on each XY Output, you should be fine. The resistor is called for in the spec.

TABLE FROM THE BOOK:

Single Scanner Set //// Dual Scanner Set
6 pair 9 pair ///// 12 pair 15 pair
Belden:
24AWG 9731 9732 9734 9735
22AWG 8778 8774 9768 8776
Columbia
24AWG C6066 C6067 C6068 ---
22AWG C6041 C6042 C6059 C6044
24AWG M39252 M39254 M39257 M39259
Manhattan
22AWG M13106 M13109 M13112 M13115

Read ALL ABOUT IT:

http://www.photonlexicon.com/forums/...8&d=1390537157



Steve