What Are The HDMI Standards?

The conversion of analogue to digital technology led to the creation of new devices and gadgets making use of the digital revolution. One such area where this digitization has found great usage is that of the TV and large display devices. The common platform of digital technology has enabled and hastened the pace of convergence of different devices, making them more compatible with one another. Therefore, the need has been felt for evolving some standards of delivering the consistent and uniform output to different audio-visual platforms. A beginning was made by major consumer electronic giants like Hitachi, Panasonic, Sony, Toshiba and others when they developed a set of standard guidelines for interconnecting different digital audio-video media. These are called the High Definition Multimedia interface (HDMI) standards.

These standards continued to be further improved and each new standard was progressive to the older one and combined more features. Each new version was also compatible with the old one. The HDMI cables and switches based on these standards were developed to deliver the same set of quality functions across different interfaces. These standards for audio/video are elaborated below:

1. Version 1.0: It was made only the DVD players.
2. Version 1.2: This was an improvement over the earlier version in that it could be used for both the television and the personal computers. The type A connectors allowed full compatibility and support to different audio/visual format on the PCs.
3. Version 1.2a: The most important thing that was accomplished with this version was the introduction of the so called, 1.2a HDMI compliance test specification (CTS). This required all the devices to be tested at an authorized testing center (ATC) for the meeting the set of compliance regulations. For a device to pass all the tests at an ATC, the connectors of the device shall be appearing on the approved connector’s list.
4. Version 1.3: This is the latest in the series of versions of standards. It has following main features:

a. Greater Speed: To satisfy the demands of future HD display devices, the new version comes with greater speeds, of about 10.2 Gbps.
b. Colour depths: This version supports the 10-bit, 12-bit and 16-bit colour depths, RGB or YCbCr. This is an improvement over the earlier versions which only supported 8-bit colour depths.
c. Removes the limitations of colour space and enables the display of any colour that can be viewed.
d. Mini connector: For connecting the small portable devices like cameras and camcorders with HD TVs, it offers smaller form factor connectors.
e. Support new lossless audio formats: It supports high-bandwidth uncompressed digital audio and all the compressed formats, like the pervious versions. It also adds additional support for new lossless compresses digital audio formats.

The non-promoter companies like LG, Samsung and a few others are also adding to the heat of competition in this segment which makes use of the HDMI cables, connectors, extenders, communication channel protocols and switches, for connecting to multiple digital devices with single or multiple-ports.