Having done a search and looked at a few reviews, I began to wonder why there was such a wide price range.

Who would pay a 3 figure sum for a lead which might perform slightly better than one costing £4.99? The likes of Home Cinema Choice (August 2005) has scart prices ranging from £45 to £260!

My 1.5 metre scart to scart lead set me back all of £7.99 and it has gold plated pins... gasp!

No doubt the "experts" would say I am condemned to watching a substandard picture ... blurred recordings on the DVD... poor sound quality, etc. Rubbish!

How much did the rest of you pay for these leads?

As with everything, it is a relative term. I have mid level equipment and so have spent £30 on my cables (though they arent gold plated so you may have got the better deal )

If you have a £50,000 system (and I know people with systems more expensive than this) then I am surer there can be a noticable difference on a much higher priced cable but on my system there wouldnt be.... on the same way that is someone still was using a "supermarket special" with a similar spec 1980's TV they wouldnt see the difference between my cables and the out the packet ones.

I use SCART cables I got from homebase, they're 1.5m, individual fully shielded, OFC, goldplated and locks on the plug itself, they are also RGB.

They give me absolutely brilliant picture, I've compared them to the similar specced Monster cable at £60, can't notice any difference, but mine only cost £5.99

Hell i've had ones from pound land. Couldn't tell the difference.

As for gold plating you do realise its a con? It makes no difference at all to the signal quality. Its a gimmick. For it to trult work the entire cable would need to be made from gold.

And the scart sockets also need to be gold as well to get any advantage. Gold on silver is worse than silver on silver.

The same is true of other connections (speaker plugs, phono's, aerial plugs, and so on).

Dave

How do you know if the scart connections are gold ,silver etc to match up,

most connectors are copper - if you look at the higher brands like QED you will note that they all profess the quality of copper connector/ what the wire is etc and dont actually gold plate them.... I have never seen the logic on the silver/gold thing but take a poor cable and dipping just the tips in gold aint going to make the poor cable good.

Only certain types of brands do the old plating... and the sort of brands that do that are the ones that make a song and dance about it... if they arent saying then it is fairly safe to assume they are copper

I may have expressed myself badly. How do you know or find out if the TV ,DVD etc sockets have gold, silver ETC to match the scart cables

my comments apply both to cables and also sources/ screens

It may be stating the obvious but have you looked at them?
They are usually nickel plated (silver coloured).

The ones from pound land will use cheap cable with all the wires bundled together with a single outer screen, and maybe only some of the pins connected.
This is the worst type of cable as crosstalk can distort the signals - eg. buzzing noise on sound and blurred picture.

You should be able to tell a difference between this and a £10 (in the high street) Scart lead.

Reasonable quality budget SCART leads :
CPC - locking SCART lead £1.57
CPC - metal plug SCART lead £3.45

It is at the low price range that the biggest quality difference can be noticed.

The wires in the cable are made of copper, often plated with nickel or tin - to prevent corrosion and to aid soldering.

Copper is a very good conductor, slightly better than gold.
Silver is a slightly better conductor than copper, but it is a small difference, certainly not worth the extra cost. I doubt anyone would be able to tell the difference.

Electrical conductance of various metals (bigger is more conductive) :

Silver...........630.5 1/mohm-cm
Copper........595.8 1/mohm-cm
Gold............446.4 1/mohm-cm
Aluminium...376.676 1/mohm-cm
Iron............102.987 1/mohm-cm

If the plug was made out of bare copper then the connection would not be very good after a period of time, because of the copper oxide layer that had formed on the plug. The base metal of the plug is usually brass or some other alloy of copper as it is mechanically harder than copper, but will oxidise in the same way.

The reason plugs are gold plated is to prevent this oxide layer forming, gold is un-reactive so does not react with the oxygen in the air.

The nickel plating on the 'silver' coloured plugs also prevents oxide forming on the plug, in the same way as gold, but is cheaper. Gold is a better conductor than nickel, but is unlikely to make much difference to the signal as the plating layer is so thin. However gold is slightly better (less reactive than nickel) as it does help keep a consistent good contact, eg. it is often used on contacts of digital camera memory cards.

Gold plating is is often used as a gimmick though, to bump up the price of cheap leads. I have even seen optical leads with gold plated tips, this doesn't make any difference whatsoever as the digital signal is sent as light via fibre optic cable, no electrical contact is made.

The cable is the most important part of a SCART lead, in general the thicker the cable the better - it is likely to have individually screened conductors of the correct impedance (to prevent loss or distortion of the signal). It is also good to have a fully screened scart plug, with a metal body, to prevent interference.
Last edited by andy_tech : 17-01-2006 at 04:39

I would like to say I spent £1000 on my scart lead, but in actual fact, I spent £1 in the pound shop and it works admirably.

i originally had some sub £10 scart leads which where gold plated and I got mild cross talk on my old tv.

Just bought a digital flatpannel and this cross talk was terrible, could actually see the analog broadcast over an AV input!

I swapped these out for £30 THOR leads from B&Q of all places and they are superb!

while the connectors don't make difference, I agree that the thinkness and the shielding in the actual cable does make one hell of a difference!

A pound shop SCART lead may give a slightly better picture than via the aerial lead (with a VCR or freeview box).
It may also give, in your opinion, an acceptable picture - but it is certainly not the best you can get.
A poor 1 metre lead may not be too bad in some applications, but the deterioration the of signal is more noticable with longer leads or on larger screens.

I do not think it is worth spending a lot (over £30) on SCART leads, a £5 to £10 lead (in the shops, cheaper elsewhere) should give a much better picture, unless you happen to get one with poor cable, like this :

I got one of these too for about £3 online.
The cable is poor, but uses gold plated plugs as a gimmick to mislead about the quality.
The cable is about 7mm diameter (usually over 10mm) and does not use separate screened wires for the video and audio signals.

This is a photo of inside the plug :
Photo of poor quality cable in SCART plug.

Better quality individually screened SCART cable

Gosh! Quite a few replies in the space of 3 days. I live in Hampshire and I bought my 1.5 m scart lead from Techno Trade in Fareham. I noticed that DIXONS (cough, splutter) have Belkin leads on display. These are 1.2 m long and are priced at £34.99 each.

What is the reason for paying £27 extra for a slightly shorter lead? Oh, it might be the fact that the Belkin leads are packed in a pretty blister pack and and mine was put in in a brown paper bag!

I bought all my SCART leads (4 in all) from Asda, priced at £3.97 each. Excellent quality.

Interesting discussion.

I think most sensible people will agree that using the free cables that come with your equipment is a bad idea.

The question is how much to spend on better quality properly shielded cables? This is of particular concern for people buying digital displays (plasma/LCD/DLP etc) which show up flaws in the signal path very clearly.

Most AV magazines recommend devoting at least 10% of your budget to cabling when buying a digital display. Some people swear by £50 Monster/IXOS cables. But then the same people probably spent £400 on a high end DVD player.

As was pointed out above you can buy an OFC SCART cable for about £6, but then you can also pay ten times the price. I wonder how much advantage there is in using expensive cabling to hook up set top boxes when digital broadcast TV is not the best quality in the first place?

Last leads i bought, about 18 months a go, was for £1.00 each at the pound store and they work great.

It depends on the manufacturer but most don't include the worst type (overall screened multicore cable) now, as it makes their equipment look poor if the picture is bad.
Although these leads are cheap, I would much rather use them than pound shop leads.

As an electonics installer, I can safely say that if you buy sony, panasonic, philips, jvc, or hitachi plasma's or lcd's the inclusion of quality scart leads is extremely important.

What some of you call a great picture I could pick apart in seconds with your nasty leads.

Each lead i use at home is a fully shielded (each wire, dialectric, and inner and outer core) cable worth £60 each. Component, Hdmi, and dvi leads are also important!

E.