The HDMI technology (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) is about to enter the PC market after becoming fairly common with home electronics. But if one might think it would be easy just to wait for the first HDMI-capable graphics cards for your PC it seems that has now been made a lot more complicated. HDMI LLC, the group behind the standard, has now announced that it has upgraded the specifications for HDMI and the HDMI 1.3 specification is considerably more future-proof than today’s version. It has namely increased the frequnecy of the interface to 225MHz, from today’s 165MHz, and this increase in bandwidth makes it possible to handle a 1080p resolution at 90Hz with 36-bit RGB color depth.
The color depth is something that has been tuned with the HDMI 1.3 specification by added support for the Deep Color technology. Deep Color makes is possible to use 30-, 36- and 48-bit RGB color depths, which is big step up from today’s monitors which often use 24-bit RGB, up to 16.7 million colors. This will resulty in considerably better color reproduction as the human eye can’t even distinguish higher color depths than 36- to 48-bit RGB.
HDMI 1.3 also sports the new sound formats Dolby HD and DTS-HD, but when the first HDMI 1.3-capable units arrive is yet to be announced.
