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Used for: More than a year
Direction markings are grey on grey and unreadable in a loft
Worth knowing before you order: this is a one-way cable and there is no polite way to discover you have pulled it backwards. The source end is marked in small grey lettering on a grey shell, which in a dark loft with a head torch is very nearly no marking at all. I put a wrap of red tape on ours before it went anywhere. Other than that it has driven a hall screen from the back office for a full season of training days with nothing worse than the occasional handshake pause when the laptop wakes.
Used for: More than a year
Head unscrews so the fibre goes through small conduit
No strain relief where the fibre enters the plug
The removable head is the whole point of buying this one. Fifty metres of active optical will not go through a 20mm conduit with a full HDMI plug moulded on the end, but unscrew the shell and the bare fibre body slides through easily. I ran ours from a comms cupboard, up through two floors and along a ceiling void to a projector in a training room, and it went in without a single hole being made bigger. Picture has been faultless since. It is directional, so mind the source and display labels before you pull, because getting it the wrong way round means doing the entire run again. That is worth saying twice! My one gripe is the lack of any strain relief where the fibre meets the head. Over a year in it still works, but I would not want that joint taking any weight.
Used for: 6–12 months
Once powered properly the 4K feed is rock solid
Needs external power and nothing tells you so
Three stars, and it is entirely about the installation rather than the picture. Mine arrived with the display end already showing a slight kink where it had been coiled too tight in the box, and with fibre that is not something you can straighten out and forget about. It works, but I have been eyeing it ever since. The second problem is power. The source end wants more than my old amplifier's HDMI port could give it, so the picture came up black until I found the micro USB socket on the head and fed it from a phone charger. Nothing in the box tells you that, and I spent a whole evening swapping ports before I worked it out. Since then, no dropouts and the 4K feed to the projector is clean. Eight months in it has behaved. I just expected an easier afternoon of it.