This is my biggest problem with consumer screens right now. HDMI sucks. Not the standard, it's a digital cable-if the standard supports it, it'll work. The design of the connector is what bugs me. You have what feels like a USB connector, that doesn't lock attached to a very thick and heavy cable. Who came up with this stupid design anyway!
This.. ish. Felt far more secure on my Dell laptop than on my Samsung TV for some reason.. I'd take a screw in connector like DVI anyday.
HDMI should have got what Display Port has with it's latch system. You have to press on the button to lower the latch and de-lock the plug to pull it out. OR, just freaking use DisplayPort already! It's always been ahead of HDMI, it has no royalty fees, the cable cost less to produce, and aren't expensive at all, it support the same HDMI copy right protection systems, you can have a longer cable, support much more plug-in and outs than HDMI (this is important for laptop), consume less power, cheaper to implement the circuitry, and backward compatible down to HDMI and single link DVI and the adapters are small, and inexpensive. It's like the ultimate connector, where you think everyone would jump on it, but put aside for inferior technology. Luckily DisplayPort has a growing home on the PC market. I just don't get why its not penetrating the TV market. I am not going to be surprised with HDMI supporter makes companies signs exclusivity contract for multiple years to tie the manufacture down to their high royalty fees connectors.
Good point actually - there's actually literally nothing stopping TV manufacturers from adding DisplayPort compatibility to their TVs. It supports HDCP and the more secure DPCP to keep Hollywood happy, it supports CEC via its aux channel and it has more bandwidth. Heck, there's even the internal DisplayPort standard for wiring the TV's SoC to the panel controller and wireless DisplayPort which will appear on 60Ghz WiGig devices when those appear on the market.
DisplayPort wasn't adopoted due to 2 things. Politics and a bad case of timing. Once they rolled out with their initial specs HDMI was already made and being produced for 3 years. There was no way that TV manufactureres would purposely re-tool and re-program their PCBs and CPUs in TVs to accept displayport when it was abundantly cheaper (having signed contracts already) to just continue producing HDMI ports. Couple it with the fact that TVs haven't needed to increase resolution in a long long time, there isn't much impetus to move from HDMI which has already been established and furthermore has more market friction. Plus Monster Cables needs business! D: The other reality is the fact that at the time, no one anticipated (typical buisness) resolution changes. We will however see DisplayPort rise soon though. It's just so much better this time around and a much more logical choice. HDMI was the only option when it first came out.
True. I was amazed at how expensive HDMI cables were in the local stores, so I ordered a $2.23 HDMI 1.4 cable from eBay instead, with free worldwide shipping. Two weeks later it arrived in the mail, and it works perfectly. I don't know how they can make such cheap cables, but works for me.
It's all digital interconnects anyways. As long as the signal is relatively clean and there's not much interference your 2m HDMI cable will be fine. If it's a 20m HDMI cable though, best splurge a bit just in case.
Does this mean that, theoretically, you could use three 4K screens in eyefinity (disregarding that the FPS would be so low it would be completely unusable, and that there is no good reason to do so)?