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HDMI Labeling Requirements Promise a Stew of Confusion
An anonymous reader writes "In many ways HDMI has revolutionized the way we connect devices. By unifying video and audio into a single cable manufacturers have been able to make their products easier to set up than ever before. Until recently there hasn't actually been much difference in HDMI cables. But things are about to get confusing with the introduction of HDMI 1.4. By the 1st of January 2012 manufacturers of products with HDMI ports won't actually be able to call HDMI 1.4 by its real name. In fact, come November 18 this year those selling cables won't be able to use HDMI 1.4 or HDMI 1.3 to delineate between different products. Instead cables that support version 1.4 of the HDMI standard will have to use one of five different labels. The new labels? Well, as this story explains, they're going to cause a new level of confusion for anyone hooking up a home cinema. Add to this the fact that the HDMI organisation keeps the details of its specifications secret, and translation between version numbering and marketing-speak will be well nigh impossible."
Will my $600 gold-plated monster superconductor cable support the new standards?
and so will your coathanger.
...just jizzed all over his monitor.
I once feigned ignorance (not much of a feat for me, in most things) and asked a Best Buy employee what was better about the $100 HDMI cables. He said two things that I thought were amazing*.
1) My Playstation3 was not going to look as good on the $20 cable, because all the colors could not go through the cheaper cable fast enough.
2) The more expensive cable uses a better conductor metal for "better frequency".
*I don't really fault an employee that's making $8 an hour with no commission for talking out his ass, I just thought this was funny.
...he colors could not go through the cheaper cable fast enough.
Did you ask him what the speed of unladen European colors are through the cheaper cabling?
In a few years presumably some even higher bandwidth specification will come along - no problem if they used version-numbers, but once you have labelled the first generation "standard" and the current generation "High Speed" what're you going to be left with to use next and not end up looking stupid?
"new higher speed", "max speed", "ultimate speed", "super more ultimate than ultimate speed", "I Can't believe its not high speed... speed"?
Ludicrous Speed
Because many TVs have sockets labelled HDMI 1, HDMI 2, HMDI 3, etc - and people would think they needed a different type of cable for each one.
I'm gay, and my A/V system is better than yours. But my cables came from Monoprice.
I worked at Best Buy in highschool. We had an ongoing competition of: -Whenever someone was interested in a ps2, try to get them to buy an XBox. -Whenever someone was interested in an XBox, try to get them to buy a ps2. Good times.
I would have asked him how a passive cable knows which bits in the stream are the colors.
A prism's also passive, and it knows how to separate colors. The wires just do the same thing, right?
I am not a crackpot.
I bought the cheapest cables that Best Buy offered and haven't had any problems.
You spent $60 on an HDMI cable?
Watch for Penguins, they eat Apples and throw rocks at Windows.
HDMI Lineup:
1.4 - High Speed
1.5 - Full Speed
1.6 - "It goes to plaid."