HDMI Spec Upgraded To Support 'Deep Color'

writertype writes "If you own a digital television, there's a good chance it supports HDMI as an A/V interface. Well, for all you early adopters who bought an HDMI-less TV and regretted it later, the HDMI spec has been upgraded yet again, to version 1.3. Features include "deep color", or color depths beyond what the human eye can perceive, eight-channel audio support, among others. Interesting note: the PlayStation 3 supports deep color, according to the HDMI chief."

Re:Upgraded...

[Xugumad]

You're marked as funny, but my TV has upgradable firmware... ...not that I'm saying that's a good thing...

Works for the tetrachromats!

[kbob88]

This will work nicely for the very few tetrachromats among us, (http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3a24199b1ef8.h tm [freerepublic.com]). These are women who through genetic accident have an extra gene for color in the eye: "that woman's retinas would have four different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly shifted green." They apparently have a much more finely tuned sense of color. Of course, there's probably only a few of them around, but hey, we're all about accessibility here!

It's an upgrade to 10, 12, and 16 bit color depth.

[Animats]

Right now, we're mostly at 8 bits of data per color channel. This upgrade supports 10, 12, and 16 bits of color per channel, or 24, 30, 36 and 48 bits per pixel.

This will be a big help in reducing banding on smooth gradients and artifacts during fades. Actually, you don't get more colors; you get more luminance range. It would probably work just as well to have 16 bits of luminance and two other color difference channels of 8 bits, but the HDMI people went uncompressed.

Now the compression people have to go to work and deal with the issues of when it's worthwhile to send that much data and when it isn't.