HDMI Standard Gets Major Facelift

Posted by Nino Marchetti Categories: HDTV, Home Entertainment

The HDMI standard looks to be getting a major facelift today as the seven companies which founded it - Hitachi, Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), Royal Philips Electronics, Silicon Image, Inc., Sony Corp., Thomson, Inc. and Toshiba Corp. – announced HDMI 1.3. The most important notables from this upgrade include a doubling of HDMI’s bandwidth from 165Mhz (4.95 gigabits per second) to 340Mhz (10.2 Gbps) to support the demands of new HD display devices and the addition of the Deep Color technology, which supports 30-bit, 36-bit and 48-bit (RGB or YCbCr) color depths.

Other enhancements in HDMI 1.3 include broader color space for support of 1.8 times as many colors as currently exist; a new mini color for smaller portable devices such as HD camcorders; an automatic A/V synching capability so increasingly complex devices can more easily connect with one another; and support for new lossless audio formats such as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

Products using the new HDMI 1.3 standard will also be backwards compatible with earlier HDMI products.

Read More | HDMI.org