What do you guys prefer for cables - plain stainless, or Teflon coated inner wires?

search the forum

plain stainless. cheaper, and they work fine.

Is tefon a brand? Never heard of it. :D

Stainless, die-drawn inners, lined outers. The coefficient of friction of Teflon/Teflon and Teflon/steel are almost identical so I do not see the performance gain from coating the inner.
And the coated inners can sometimes be a bear to clamp securely; I generally end up scrapingwire-wheeling the coating off where I clamp them. PITA.

+100. I stopped buying Teflon coated inner cables after problems with them slipping at the clamp bolts no matter how hard I tightened them. I had to scrape off the coating at the clamp to make them hold their adjustment. No benefit, more costly and a nuisance downside

That's a good question. I just went through a cable search and trial building up my dream bike, which has internal routing and some difficult bends.

Among stainless cables, there's a range of quality -- some are really smooth, others not as much. One thing to notice, among brake cables, is if it has both the road and mountain ends, leaving you to clip one. A cut cable doesn't route as easily as one with a soldered end. I think the SRAM cables are good examples of plain stainless. From what I can tell, they make one cable for all their upper end road sets, and it works.

Among the coated, I have tried the Shimano 9000 and Aican Bungarus. The Aican Bungarus cable housing is super difficult and very limited in where you'd want to use it (they have fragile joinery that uses a fragmented inner liner) but the cables seem really nice. The coating doesn't shred and fuzz up like Shimano 9000 and it's slick without slipping out of the binder bolt.

I've used the 9000/XTR cables, and they seem very slick, but as others mentioned, they can slip the bolt. On road levers, particularly SRAM, I have trouble installing them without shredding the coating into a full length fuzz. As for what happens on the derailleur side, I didn't find stripping off the coating to be difficult -- it was really too easy. Just take a stamp sized piece of any grit sandpaper, fold it over and run it down away from the mark once or twice.

Also, I got some Bontrager XXX cables, which I'd guess are really made by Jagwire. They're like a highly polished stainless, possibly with some coating, but it's hard to tell. I didn't see a big advantage over plain SRAM stainless. The XXX housing is so-so; it has a plastic inner sleeve surrounded by alloy beads. I didn't notice a huge drop in friction. It seemed like there was actually more drag than with a good lined housing and a SRAM stainless cable.

It seemed like a few or several years ago, there was a real competition for great cables and housing -- Nokon, Yokozuna, etc -- and now I had a harder time figuring out the best option. In the end, I went with Shimano 9000 housing and the Aican cables, because I had it in my quest for some ultimate system. If done again, I think the SRAM set would be a good buy. Or just get the 9000 housing and use any high quality stainless cable.

My Brompton came with coated cables , where the housing bends are , the wear-friction, rubbed off the coating ..

Recent new threads so bad we need to dig through the old ones? I hope riding season returns soon for you.