HDMI is already the champ when it comes to consumer (and even Pro) electronics, and now the technology gets a boost with the release of a major enhancement to the spec. It was signed off by the HDMI founder companies (Hitachi, Ltd., Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. (Panasonic), Royal Philips Electronics, Silicon Image, Inc., Sony Corp., Thomson, Inc. and Toshiba Corp.).

The HDMI 1.3 specification more than doubles HDMI’s bandwidth — from 165MHz (4.95 gigabits per second) to 340 MHz (10.2 Gbps) — and adds support for Deep Color technology, a broader color space, new digital audio formats, automatic audio/video synching capability (“lip sync”), and an optional smaller connector for use with personal photo and video devices. They say the HDMI 1.3 will allow the next generation of HDTVs, PCs and DVD players to transmit and display content in billions of colors with unprecedented vividness and accuracy. It supports 30-bit, 36-bit and 48-bit (RGB or YCbCr) color depths, up from the 24-bit depths in the previous spec.

HDMI Licensing, LLC also announced that more than 400 makers of consumer electronics and PC products worldwide have adopted HDMI. Market researcher In-Stat expects 60 million devices featuring HDMI to ship in 2006.

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