The HDMI 2.2 standard

How does the new version of HDMI differ from the current standard?

- David Crookes

Move over HDMI 2.1! There’s a new video cable standard in town - HDMI 2.2 - and it’s about to turn up the quality dial to unprecedented levels. Set to make a big difference to the images you'll see on televisions and monitors in the future, it was announced by the HDMI Forum at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January. But to discover why you should be excited and to better understand what it does, it's worth rewinding a little.

HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) dates back to 2002 when a handful of top tech companies (among them Hitachi, Panasonic, Philips, Sony, Silicon Image, Thomson and Toshiba) sought to design a new industry-wide standard for transmitting video and sound between devices.

It led to the unveiling of HDMI 1.0 which had a bandwidth of 4.95Gbps (gigabytes-per-second). Capable of supporting video resolutions of up to 1920x1080 pixels (otherwise known as 1080p - or Full HD), it offered refresh rates of 60Hz while also transporting eight channels of 192kHz/24-bit uncompressed audio. As such, it was more advanced than SCART and other connection methods and, as the technology improved greatly, so did its adoption.

Each iteration has allowed for greater bandwidths, making HDMI capable of supporting displays with ever higher resolutions. HDMI 1.4, for example, was the first to support 4K resolution at up to 3840x2160p and a refresh rate of up to 30Hz thanks to a bandwidth of 10.2Gbps. HDMI 2.0 went further with a bandwidth of 18Gbps, allowing 4K refresh rates of 60Hz, while HDMI 2.1 is able to transmit up to 48Gbps - supporting a 4K resolution at a 120Hz refresh rate (as well as a 1080p resolution at 480Hz).

Ever sharper