Digital Trends

The companies behind HDMI technology have released the HDMI 1.3 specification, which doubles bandwidth, expands color capability, and adds technology like "lip synching."

The seven companies which founded the HDMI Licensing group—Hitachi, Matsushita, Sony, Silicon Image, Thomson, Royal Philips, and Toshiba—have released the specifications for HDMI 1.3, doubling the bandwidth and adding new features like support for Deep Color technology and new audio formats, plus automatic "lip synching" to keep audio and video tracks lined up. Products implementing HDMI 1.3 will be backward compatible with existing HDMI products.

"The dramatic increase in maximum speed achieved in HDMI 1.3 willenable HDMI to stay far ahead of the bandwidth demands of future highdefinition source and display devices," said Leslie Chard, president ofHDMI Licensing, LLC. "As the de facto standard digital interface for thehigh definition and consumer electronics markets, HDMI is implementing themost innovative technologies today to fulfill the demands of tomorrow'sconsumers."

HDMI 1.3 adopts Deep Color, adding support for 30-bit, 36-bit, and 48-bit RGB or YCbCr color depths, an extension over the 24-bit depths in previous HDMI specs. In theory, this enables HD devices display billions of colors, which might be interesting from a technical standpoint but strains the limits of human vision. Perhaps more significantly, though, the technology will eliminate on-screen color banding during transitions and areas with subtle shifts and gradations of color, and enable enhanced contrast rations across entire displays. It also improves the number of greys which can be handled between black and white. HDMI 1.3 also adopts the xvYCC international video standard which offers 1.8 times as many colors as existing HDTV signals, and adopts lossless compressed and uncompressed audio formats such as Dolby Digital and DTS as well as Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio.

The HDMI 1.3 spec also outlined an optional mini connector for portable consumer devices like camcorders and still cameras, and a new synchronization feature which should enable audio and video tracks to stay synched up even with all the signal processing users are applying to their systems.

Where does this apply to you? According to Sony's Ken Kutaragi, the forthcoming Playstation 3 gaming console will support HDMI 1.3.