Digital Home Canada

HDMI Licensing this week released a major enhancement of the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) specification to Version 1.3 which promises higher speeds, higher resolutions and support for new lossless audio standards. Products with the V1.3 standard aren't expected until 2007.

HDMI is a new type of cable connection that is used to transmit digital signals from your cable set top box, DVD player or satellite receiver to your high definition television. Most consumer electronics devices on the market today operate under the V1.1 standard. 

The HDMI standard, which was developed by seven major companies (Hitachi, Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), Royal Philips Electronics, Silicon Image, Inc., Sony Corp., Thomson, Inc. and Toshiba Corp.), and has been adopted by more than 400 makers of consumer electronics and PC products worldwide. Market researcher In-Stat expects 60 million devices featuring HDMI to ship in 2006.

The primary benefit of the HDMI connection is that it transmits uncompressed digital audio and video from video sources to your HDTV and it does so using one cable. One HDMI cable replaces 3 analog video connections for high definition video and up to 6 analog audio connections for high-resolution audio.

The biggest downside of the HDMI specification to date has been the improper implementation of HDCP by manufacturers. HDCP (High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection) is a copy protection scheme, developed by Intel which prevents the unauthorized duplication of digital signals that are sent via HDMI connections.

Over the last year, the Digital Forums have been rife with consumers complain their HDMI devices don't "talk to one another". The result has been consumers are stuck with   expensive high definition personal video recorders (HD PVR's) and upconverting DVD players  that can't output a digital signal to their HDTV.

In announcing the new specification, the licensing group made no mention of efforts to resolve compatibility issues between manufacturers or penalties for manufacturers who fail to correctly implement the HDMI specification.

HDMI Licensing announced the new HDMI 1.3 specification will more than doubles HDMI’s bandwidth and adds support for Deep Color technology, a broader color space, new digital audio formats, automatic audio/video synching capability (“lip sync”), and an optional smaller connector for use with personal photo and video devices. More importantly for consumers, products implementing the new HDMI specification will be backward compatible with earlier HDMI products.

Deep Color lets HDTVs and other displays go from millions of colors to billions of colors allowing consumers to enjoy unprecedented vividness and accuracy of color on their displays. Deep Color eliminates on-screen color banding, for smooth tonal transitions and subtle gradations between colors. It enables increased contrast ratio, and can represent many times more shades of gray between black and white.

Availability

The Sony Playstation 3, which is scheduled to ship in November 2006, is expected be the first source product to implement HDMI V1.3, however, the bulk of HDMI V1.3 devices such such as hi-definition DVD players, A/V receivers and HDTV's aren't expected to follow until 2007. 

Consumers who are waiting for products that incorporate the new specification may have some difficulty finding them, however, since the licensing organization is not requiring manufacturers to specify what version of HDMI a particular product supports. In an overview, the group simply says that "Consumers should not look for a particular version of HDMI, but rather for the functionality that they want the device to support (Deep Color, specific audio formats, etc.).”

Digital Home recommends that if you are waiting to purchase an HDMI V1.3 device, you confirm V1.3 compatibility from the manufacturer’s website or discuss with other potential buyers in our Digital Forums.

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