However, despite labeling saying they're High Speed, not all High Speed cables were actually made to handle the maximum amount of High Speed data as specified by HDMI Licensing. That's the beauty of HDMI, it's a dumb pipe, sending whatever you want over it. In theory your High Speed cable should work just fine. You maybe have noticed a few weasel words when I talked about your cables working with HDR. That's why some devices, like the Samsung UBD-K8500 4K Blu-ray player, have two HDMI outputs: one "main" for both video and audio, and a second one for "audio only."
HDMI CABLE LENGTH LIMIT 4K UPGRADE
In this case you might need to upgrade your receiver, or connect your HDR source directly to your TV and send the audio separately to the receiver. The HDR data gets "blocked" at the receiver (or technically, didn't get sent by the player once it saw the receiver was HDMI 1.4). So if you connect a UHD BD player to a 3-year-old receiver that only has HDMI 1.4, it won't matter that your TV is HDMI 2.0a/2.2. If your receiver/sound bar is a few years old, it almost certainly does not. If your TV is HDR, it almost certainly has at least one HDMI input with 2.0a/2.2. As in, your TV, receiver and source all have to be HDMI 2.0a, and usually require HDCP 2.2 copy protection too. Any true High Speed cable bought from 2010 onward will also do the same thing as a Standard Speed one (a cable older than 2009, though, is less likely to work).Įvery step in your AV chain (the expensive devices into which you plug the cables) generally must be HDMI 2.0a for HDR to work. There's no reason to buy a Standard Speed cable. And they're cheap: about $6 for a 6-foot version on Amazon, for example. Nearly every HDMI cable you're likely to buy is the best one: High Speed with Ethernet. There are four basic types of HDMI cables in the home: So your TV might be " HDMI 2.0a" (and indeed needs to be for HDR), but the cable you plug into it doesn't have a number. There is no such thing as an "HDR HDMI" cable or an "HDMI 2.0" cable. They don't care (to an extent) what you send through them.
That's because there's no such thing as an HDR HDMI cable. Well, amazingly enough, they probably can, unless they're really long. If you want to take advantage of this latest and greatest, you need an HDR TV (of course), an HDR-capable source (either a streaming app on your TV or a media streamer/UHD BD player) and HDR video to watch.īut do you need new HDMI cables? Surely those many-years-old, dust-covered, ultracheap cables you bought at Dollar World can't handle this new TV technology? The latest TV technology is high dynamic range, or HDR.