Quality of cables really isn't that much of an issue nowadays. Basically you wanna make sure that the cable isn't going to fall apart or short any time soon. But in terms of picture quality, the actual metals used in the fibers of the cable really doesn't make a huge difference when it's HD. This used to be case back in the RCA days, but not anymore.

Well, first thing I must ask is Are you using a HDTV?

Never ever use Monster Cables. They charge a huge markup on their cables and are a rip off. And, as another person asked, are you using an HD TV?

the signal jump from a $3 cable to a $20 cable is huge but the only diff between a $20 & a $100 cable is $80 - if the back of the set is exposed get good looking cables, if not save the $80 - or you can give it to me if you want I see 5-6 tv's every week with the HDMI jacks dammaged by overweight cables - monster will not pay for this dammage

Please stop saying that with "HD" the cable doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with HD and everything to do with Analog vs Digital cables/formats. High Definition (HD) is not always digital, you can get a 1080p definition (aka HD) signal out of a Component video cable, which is analog. Let's do a general comparison between analog and digital signals. Let's say that the cables both are experiencing a 20% signal loss. With an analog cable it'll generally result in 20% of the signal being distorted in some way. With digital we're looking for either a 0 or a 1. If we're only getting 80% of the signal strength, it still falls above the cutoff point which is something like 0.3 - 0.7 (I don't know the exact numbers) so we don't really care as much. It'll just say 0.8 is above 0.3 so it must be a 1 and we don't lose any of the original signal. Also, a bad digital signal results in blocks of the signal freezing, not a bad picture. That's why cheap digital (HDMI/DVI) cables give the same result as the expensive ones (as long as the signal is above the threshold value that makes 1s). FYI monoprice.com is a good source of cheap cables