This holiday season, many consumers are buying 4K televisions — and rightly so. Look, UHD offers significant improvements over 1080p, while prices for these displays are at all-time lows. If you need a television, it would be foolish not to get a 4K variant at this time.
This holiday season, many consumers are buying 4K televisions — and rightly so. Look, UHD offers significant improvements over 1080p, while prices for these displays are at all-time lows. If you need a television, it would be foolish not to get a 4K variant at this time.
What if I told you that 4K was old news? It’s true. While UHD is hardly obsolete — it will be around for a very long time — the future is starting to emerge. You see, today, the HDMI Forum releases the next standard — HDMI 2.1. This will not only allow 10K video content, but 8K @ 60Hz and 4K @ 120Hz. This won’t just benefit movie playback either — gamers will be big winners once hardware catches up.
“Supporting the 48Gbps bandwidth is the new Ultra High Speed HDMI Cable. The cable ensures high-bandwidth dependent features are delivered including uncompressed 8K video with HDR. It features exceptionally low EMI (electro-magnetic interference) which reduces interference with nearby wireless devices. The cable is backwards compatible and can be used with the existing installed base of HDMI devices,” says HDMI Forum.
The forum also shares, “Version 2.1 of the HDMI Specification is backward compatible with earlier versions of the specification, and was developed by the HDMI Forum’s Technical Working Group whose members represent some of the world’s leading manufacturers of consumer electronics, personal computers, mobile devices, cables and components.”
The HDMI Forum lists the following significant features of version 2.1.
Should you throw away your 4K TV? No, of course not. It will be many years before consumer televisions featuring such an insane 10K resolution will be available. If and when they do hit stores, they will be wildly expensive and likely won’t have much content. Hell, Apple TV 4K can’t even play UHD YouTube yet. Steaming 10K would also eat up a lot of bandwidth.
Where 10K, 8K60, and 4K120 will pop up first, however, will be on enthusiast computers. HDMI 2.1 will usher in very expensive monitors and GPUs that photographers, videographers, and early adopters will desire.
Are you excited for 10K and HDMI 2.1? Tell me about it in the comments below.
