There are countless threads on this topic yet none seem to offer any concrete answers and I am hellava confused. I hope people in future will be able to reference this thread for clarification and answer their questions.
1) Many advise that each twisted pair should be individually shielded when doing a "diy-style" run. But I took apart ILDA cable today and the only shielding present was a single outer shield, nor was it twisted in pairs. So what about non-twisted cable: Is a single outer shield sufficient for say 30m non-twisted runs? I have access to this for about $0.3 per meter.
2) Stanwax's ILDA over cat5 brings in even more confusion. There is no shielding whatsoever within generic cat5 cable (please correct me if wrong) yet it allows runs of 50m. Now I believe this is because the twisted pairs cancel out noise - fine. But if the projector only uses R+,G+,B+ and gnd on the projector side what then? Or is the mere presence of R-,G-,B- running along the cable sufficient to cancel out noise (even though not connected to anything on the projector side). Or does the product use fancy circuitry to make up for single-ended projectors?
3) What is stopping me from making up my own ILDA cable with 2x cat5 totally unshielded running next to one another and soldering DB25 connectors on each end? If I pay attention to the twisted pairs (ie: R+R-, X+X-) and so forth will I be good to go with 50m for a projector that uses only positive colour signals?
4) For the above, would I want to use in each colour pair
a) R+Gnd, G+Gnd, B+Gnd
or b) R+R-, G+G-, B+B- even though the negatives remain completely isolated from the negative side of the lasers as the lasers are instead connected to ground.
c) R+R-, G+G-, B+B- and connect the negative input to ground on my lasers (logic tells me that even though laser drivers are not built for differential inputs, anything below 0v will register as 0v so all will be fine)
That is all I can think of at the moment.
Thanks in advance!