I hosted a LAN this past week with modded Xboxs. The difference between this one and the previous is we used HD TVs. Completely forgot about the horrendous input lag. My question is will purchasing any HD component cable get rid of the lag? They have ones as cheap as $10 and some are $20+. Does the brand actually matter for this? Gold/Silver plated? Thanks for any help!

In an unshielded copper conductor the signal travels at 95 to 97% of the speed of light, while in a typical coaxial cable it is about 66% of the speed of light. If your video cable is 2m long then that means that the time it takes the signal to travel down the cable is between 0.000007 and 0.000010 seconds.

Let's imagine that a really bad cable existed, one that delayed the signal by 10 times that amount i.e. the delay would rise to 0.0001 seconds, or 0.1mS.

Given that the picture scan/refresh rate is 50/60 Hz (around 20mS), and the speed of your reactions is between 160 and 190mS, do you think that you could detect a 0.1mS difference in a video cable?

Now, cables that bad simply don't exist. If you find a cable that is 10% worse than typical you would be very unlucky, so you'd be looking for a difference of 0.000001 seconds.......

So no, the video cable brand makes no difference to the delay. It might affect the picture quality, but that's different.

Well thank you for the thorough explanation!

What can you say about the input lag? That's my main concern. We're running out of tube tvs

Get a TV with game mode that bypasses much of the the TV's built in filters/image processing.

Well, it's easier to get a $7 cable than to find a TV with a game mode.

Can anyone confirm if a HD component cable can eradicate input lag on an original Xbox to LCD?

Thank you for your reply!

It technically shouldn't but at the same time should. The reason i say this (i may be wrong) is because its just a cable, it just sends the signal and as Movax pointed out, the signal travels at almost the speed of light. But it might work since your TV (given its a 720p tv) wouldnt apply as many filters to make the image "better" which theoretically should give it less lag, but not by much. But theres only one way to find out, buy the cable (and look for a game mode on your tv)

It won't help because it is not addressing the problem.

The lag is a function of the display's image processing (Movax's point), not how the signal gets to the display (part of Heimdall's point.

You need a decent TV that allows you to bypass this as previously stated, not a different cable.