HDMI reduces their licensing fees to increase amount of devices
By Matt Burns 
posted Jul 21st 2006 12:08PM
posted Jul 21st 2006 12:08PM
Did you know that in order for a manufacturer to use HDMI, they have to pay a licensing fee of $15,000 to HDMI Licensing LLC. This fee was just lowered by 1/3 to $10,000 with the hopes that more manufacturers will use the 'single cable wonder.' This is aimed directly at the Chinese electronics manufactures that accounted for 82,000,000 TVs and 140,000,000 DVD players last year. China Video Industry Association (CVIA) is going to work with Silicon Image, makers of HDMI chips, to promote the interface to the Chinese giants. Currently, many DVD players, TVs, and even laptops from mainstream companies utilize the cable but with the lower cost, and the advent of the mini-HDMI plug thanks to the 1.3 revision, we will see more devices using it.
What improvement does 1.3 make?
HDMI 1.3 will more than double the bandwidth of the existing HDMI 1.1 standard from 165 MHz (4.95 Gbps) to 340 MHz (10.2 Gbps). This opens the door to future improvements such as higher resolutions, so called, 'Deep Color' technology and higher frame rates.
Deep Color will enable 30, 36 and 48 bit (RGB or YCbCr) color depths. HDMI 1.1 has only 24 bit color depth. This translates going from millions of colors to billions of colors.
HDMI 1.3 incorporates an automatic audio/video synching capability and true lossless compressed digital audio formats (Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio) as well.
Look also for a mini connector for HD perepherals.
There is also NO way to make an HDMI 1.1 device into a 1.3 device. There is NO firmware or software enabling fix. You are either 1.3 or not. Apparently, PS3 will be 1.3. This will likely be the first implementation. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.