Now we're at the point where we expect our high-definition equipment to have HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) connections in order to transfer high-quality digital video and audio, we now find out that the standard is being enhanced.
Future equipment could soon carry version 1.3 of the HDMI standard, which increases bandwidth, audio options and viewable colours.
Specifically:
- Bandwidth is doubled from 4.95Gbps to 10.2Gbps (Gigabits per second)
- This will allow refresh rates to increase from 60Hz to 120Hz.
- Colour bit depth can increase from 24-bit to 48-bit RGB, delivering 1.8 times more viewable colours - which hits the limit of that discernible by the human eye.
- Will be able to transport uncompressed audio formats - as HDMI frame rate is increased from 192kHz to 768kHz - including lossless-compression Dolby TrueHD, and DTS HD Master.
So from the end of this year onwards we can expect manufacturers to boast the enhanced quality of their displays and next-gen DVD players.
Nevertheless, the end result will only be as good as the supply chain, and all equipment from image and audio capture, through editing, broadcast or disc production, and playback, will need to transfer the additional information for it to be of any benefit to the consumer.
Given that HDMI is such a relatively new technology anyway, it will be interesting to see how quickly manufacturers take up 1.3, how good backwards-compatibility is, and how soon content will take advantage of the extra features.
Is this news post actually related to any announcement regading the 1.3 specification?
As the official www.hmdi.org website seems to indicate that 1.3 has not even been officially released yet.
Slow news day?
I know 1.3 hasn't officially been released yet though it's been in the pipeline since last year. According to my news release it's due for approval within the next few weeks, and so could then be implemented into CE products.
I found the original article interesting as I had not heard much on HDMI-spec upgrade recently, and the article was making a more general comment on the speed of advancement of new technology, and how it affects consumers.