Why we use proper professional coax as our fully shielded cable.

Edit for 2022: Two years ago we added a properly individually shielded cheaper option to coax called Fortraflex which is made from highly flexible cable. It’s still got a higher grade of shielding and flexibility than everyone else’s cables on the market but is not 75 ohm rated. This article explains coax which we are still offering as options on most of our cables and will do so going forward, as it is still our best seller.

In 2014 we received our first requests for true shielded cable, and what people were specifically asking for was mini coax. We sourced coax made for SCART applications as our first foray into higher graded wire. This cable was thick, and often hard to work with. But we pressed ahead because it’s what the community was asking for.

However, when the source of SCART standard coax dried up due to the standard becoming obsolete, we had to find a better solution.

We notice the community is moving forward and more and more people are getting into professional equipment. People are requesting BNC hookups for studio grade monitors.

The problem with SCART is that while a professional grade image is possible, it’s not a professional solution. SCART is a consumer grade standard and the wire in these cables is not as high grade as mini coax used in studios to hook up RGBHV and RGBS signals.

It is possible to source cable that’s individually shielded and not actually coax. In fact our new Italian supplier also sells this type of cable for consumer grade video. The lines in these cables lack outer insulation and use less shield than professional video grade mini coax. This results in a much thinner overall cable. We appreciate some people prefer this because the wires are easier to position but it’s not a solution we wanted to entertain. You can get that solution elsewhere, so we want to offer a different solution that attracts a different kind of customer.

Coax is the best way to shield your video cabling, and is the industry standard for video equipment. It might seem overkill for a gaming system, but people are getting more and more particular about maxing out the spec of their display.

Coax is also necessary for BNC cabling, so if we want to press ahead with that, it’s the standard we need to stick to. It’s definitely what we want to press ahead with. We *vastly* prefer the quality of the connectors.

Our BNC cables now all use 75 ohm rated Coax for the cable, and 75 ohm rated Neutrik BNCs for the connectors. These are similarly, professional grade connectors used in the industry.

Our SCART cables all use the same 75 ohm rated coax as the BNC cables, hence the presence of a control line (necessary for the RGB selection switch in SCART equipment.) Only one control line is needed, so we’ve cut out a lot of extraneous wires from our previous coax solution.

We offer the best grade of shielded RGB cable for video game cabling on the market. We limit our overheads considerably to still bring this to you at an affordable price.

The majority of the thickness of our coax cabling is in fact devoted to the shielding. This is why the new black coax is superior to the older blue coax. The individual lines might look about the same thickness, but the outer insulation is thinner - so each line isn’t bound in thick plastic. There is now double the amount of metal shielding. The inner dielectric is now composed of a material used in video industry coax cables. It is no longer SCART grade coax, it’s RGBHV grade coax.

We are giving you the specs from the Italian manufacturer’s catalogue for the mini coax used in our cables. See picture - our cabling uses the same grades of coax, but with 6 lines rather than 5. The overall cable is also based on the same spec throughout, with flame retardant pvc coating. The only thing we changed was that, while the mini coaxes all use OFC copper wire as the shield, the external overall outer shield that wraps all 6 mini coaxes together is foil - this was to keep overall diameter down and to make it easier to strip - in BNC breakout cables, this outer shield is not used as it cannot be terminated due to the outer black casing being stripped away.