HDMI Spec Upgraded To Support 'Deep Color'

writertype writes "If you own a digital television, there's a good chance it supports HDMI as an A/V interface. Well, for all you early adopters who bought an HDMI-less TV and regretted it later, the HDMI spec has been upgraded yet again, to version 1.3. Features include "deep color", or color depths beyond what the human eye can perceive, eight-channel audio support, among others. Interesting note: the PlayStation 3 supports deep color, according to the HDMI chief."

Comments

I only care about ONE deep color

[reklusband]

Does it support Deep Purple? Inna gadda davida baby! 8 CHANNELS AND DEEP PURPLE!!!!

Re:I only care about ONE deep color

[Hawthorne01]

And neither one of them have enough cowbell.

Licenced colors

[Volante3192]

Unfortunatly, due to unforseen copyright issues, all colors between Deep Green and Deep Violent will be subjected to a licencing fee.

IBM was unreachable for comment.

Re:Licenced colors

[Sponge Bath]

... and Deep Violent

This would sharpen you up and make you
ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.

Re:Licenced colors

[Jugalator]

Hmm... Hues of blue are inbetween those two in the spectrum.
The Hooloovoo, super-intelligent shades of the color blue, will sue the ass out of the copyright holder on this one for sure.

Huh?

[sexyrexy]

Sorry for stating the obvious, but doesn't color depths beyond what the human eye can perceive just seem really... pointless? I don't think the human eye is going to evolve to greater color sensitivity during HDMI's lifetime. It's one thing to have a higher quality image to downsample to, but... seriously. Isn't there SOMETHING the bandwidth could be used for besides information we can't use?

Re:Huh?

[statemachine]

I figured someone would be confused by this. However, the article expains:
"The color bit depth [of today's displays] is typically 24-bits RGB - that gets you 16 million colors, and the human eye can distinguish that," Chard said. "That leads to scaling and onscreen effects which you can pick up. Either 36-bit or 48-bit RGB is beyond the ability of the human eye to distinguish."

Right now your eye can see the color transitions. The point is to make it so you can't see the transitions.

Re:Huh?

[pthisis]

With current color depths, you can distinguish the difference between adjacent colors (in some limited portions of the field). By taking it to a depth where differences are imperceptible, you make things look smoother.

Essentially you want to have your colors go as deep as you need to to make differences imperceptible, which this (supposedly) does. After that going even deeper would be a waste.

Re:Huh?

[MBCook]

The best example of this is a gradient. Take your monitor and make a gradient that is full screen from solid red to solid black. As things are now you get 256 bands of color because there are 256 possible values for red. The problem with this is that the transitions are VERY obvious.

Now if you have 4090 possible values of red, your eye may not be able to perceive the difference between #1024 and #1032 individually. But when you make that large gradient while you will not be able to see the individual bands.

You've gone from blocky to smooth. Anywhere you want a gradient, this is good. Fading to black, the sky, etc. And let's not forget that this can give us better HDR.

Re:Huh?

[JDevers]

I can see it now "On Monday, October 13th don't miss the premiere of "Flowers!" filmed in our proprietary ultraviolet format!

---while watching "Flowers!" with a UV equipped television, remember to wear sunscreen and sit at least eight feet away from the screen or risk sunburn"

You're confused

[93,000]

You're confused. The song you're talking about is done by that religion guy, I. Ron Butterfly.

Bad video games. Bad!

[Volante3192]

Geeze, there's a case for video games adversely affecting the mind... Even with the preview button I missed that typo. It's Violet. VIOLET!!

How can they tell it works?

[sehlat]

"Color depths beyond what the human eye can perceive." Whoopie! Somebody get my retina upgrades at once!

Re:beyond what the human eye can see?

[one-eye-johnson]

The HDMI spec now supports microwaves. If you're suspected by the MPAA of watching pirated films your TV just cooks you as you sit.

Upgraded...

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

So how do I flash the firmware on my TV and DVD player?

Re:Upgraded...

[Xugumad]

You're marked as funny, but my TV has upgradable firmware... ...not that I'm saying that's a good thing...

Hidden Agenda

[eclectro]

If the media you are playing is not Approved Media (TM), it plays in shallow color, otherwise known as black and white.

I know some Vrusk who will be interested in this.

[mmell]

Their vision extends somewhat into the UV, IIRC.

Will this be available on the Vrusk homeworld?

Wait a minute!

[spun]

This sounds like rock and/or roll!

Re:Bad video games. Bad!

[B1]

In fact many parents don't even let their children play violet video games, for fear that the games might adversely affect their children's minds.

Re:beyond what the human eye can see?

[EvanED]

It doesn't increase the range of values that can be represented probably, just the resolution. (I don't mean resolution in the 1080p sense, but the bit depth of each pixel. E.G. the 24-bit part of 24-bit, 48 kHz.) It decreases the difference in between successive levels of each color.

Grue and Bleen

[spun]

The new spec lets you see the difference between green and grue, and also between blue and bleen. Riddle of Induction solved!

Re:Grue and Bleen

[masterzora]

It still does it matter. It is still pitch black. You are still likely to be eaten by a grue.

Hey, can I heat my home with this?

[mmell]

After all, if there's a fire on TV, a lot of the energy involved is in the IR spectrum - that's radiant heat.

Works for the tetrachromats!

[kbob88]

This will work nicely for the very few tetrachromats among us, (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a24199b1ef8.h tm). These are women who through genetic accident have an extra gene for color in the eye: "that woman's retinas would have four different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly shifted green." They apparently have a much more finely tuned sense of color. Of course, there's probably only a few of them around, but hey, we're all about accessibility here!

Daisy-Chain Or Make It Cheaper

[TerenceRSN]

I have an HDMI enable HDTV and I use it. It's good I guess but the problem I have with HDMI is that it's limited to one stream of information per connection. Look at firewire, it allows you to daisy chain multimedia and other devices and it works pretty well. I'm sure HDMI has way more bandwidth but most people aren't looking to get 8 streams of digital audio and 1080p. I'd be much happier if I could daisy chain a cable high-def box with a DVD player or game console and send that to my TV. In my setup I run an HDMI cable from my cable box to my TV but since my TV (a panasonic) doesn't have any digitial audio output I still need to run a S/PDIF optical cable from my cable box to my audio receiver.

What a truly revolutionary digital interface would provide in my opinion is all the goodness of digital audio and video over one cord for several devices with a common protocol for controlling what's being used. This would simplify cable hook-ups plus make it easier to switch between sources (I know my parents have a horrible time switching from DVDs to TV to VCR, etc.).

Re:beyond what the human eye can see?

[ShyGuy91284]

Blu-Rays of course. Isn't that obvious?

HDMI hardware support

[path_man]

Really, shouldn't the industry concentrate on properly implementing to the existing spec's before they bother with new & improved features?? I currently have an HDTV Panasonic plasma panel, a Denon receiver and a SciAtl set-top-box all tied together with HDMI, and I cannot get a signal because HDMI does not properly authenticate for the very reason HDMI was created -- to legally broadcast copy protected signals.

I am personally sick of these half-assed industry rollouts where most of the spec is adhered to by vendors, but the rest is blatently ignored, just so they can be first to market with a shiney new badge on their product. There is so much inoperability between HighDef products and home-theatre in general, that you're really playing russian roulette by being the first on your block to try an untested combination of components.

To you vendors out there: GET IT RIGHT first. You know why folks aren't lining up outside their local electronics boutique to get the latest HD gear? They are pretty sure that the stuff isn't going to work and they won't be separated from their hard-earned dough by the latest marketing gimmick.

PS - in case anyone wants to know my "workaround" I actually had to downgrade to connecting my SciAtl box to the Denon via component RGB cables then run HDMI to my panel. I talked with a Denon tech and this was the only workaround due to the stupidity of the *ahhem* engineering *ahhhem* at SciAtl. Maybe the Cisco acquisition will fix that nonsense.

Re:HDMI hardware support

[vanyel]

Diverging slightly, this reminds me of the problem I ran into: I just bought a new house and setup a theater in it. As part of that, I bought a new Denon 3805, which has a feature where it converts all video inputs to HDMI, so I only have to run one relatively small cable to the projector, a Sharp XV-Z10000. It has a DVI input, but HDMI-DVI adapters are simple and readily available. Get everything hooked up, and find that my HD Tivo works, my progressive DVD recorder works, my old regular Tivo does not, and my non-progressive dvd player does not work. After some discussion with Crutchfield tech support (which almost made paying their premium worth it), it came out that the Sharp does not support interlaced input on the DVI port, and the Denon doesn't de-interlace in the up-conversion process. I nearly sent the receiver back, but the old one had some other problems the new one solved, and 99% of my watching is either the HD Tivo or the progressive dvd player, and running an extra S-video cable isn't that big of a deal, so I kept it.

It reared its ugly head again recently when I wanted to record something from the HD Tivo to the DVD recorder: I've not used the S-video connection for some time, and for various reasons, the cabling is still temporary. I had to tell the HD Tivo to switch to the S-video output to record to the DVD recorder, and found the S-video connection wasn't working. Try reconfiguring a Tivo without the video working!

I'm told by a knowledgeable friend that the DVI spec does not include interlaced input options. I assume HDMI must or the upconversion feature would be useless, but it's yet another reminder to double check interface compatibility when getting things you want to talk to each other.

It's an upgrade to 10, 12, and 16 bit color depth.

[Animats]

Right now, we're mostly at 8 bits of data per color channel. This upgrade supports 10, 12, and 16 bits of color per channel, or 24, 30, 36 and 48 bits per pixel.

This will be a big help in reducing banding on smooth gradients and artifacts during fades. Actually, you don't get more colors; you get more luminance range. It would probably work just as well to have 16 bits of luminance and two other color difference channels of 8 bits, but the HDMI people went uncompressed.

Now the compression people have to go to work and deal with the issues of when it's worthwhile to send that much data and when it isn't.

How about an upgrade to make HDMI work right?

[fisternipply]

As an A/V professional, I'd be happy with a new HDMI spec that actually worked right and reliably. Us folks in the biz are still using analog component video for HD, and will until things like HDCP handshake errors and mysterious port disablings are a thing of the past.