Sunday 20 March 2011

What Makes An HDMI Cable So Important Today

By Areelitaha Joahlanski


High Definition Multimedia Interface cables (HDMI cable) is able to use a digital signal to send a progressive scan. What exactly is that anyway?

An analogue signal is an electric current that varies as it's sent up a wire. Information is relayed by altering the current many times per second. It's a truly high definition signal, whereas digital can only be as fine as is allowed by processing power. Analogue current signals are just that: currents of electrons conducting their way through whatever metal is in the wire. Sometimes it's gold. You can zoom into this signal for a long time before it starts to break down. But it would be impractical to create such fine signals, as you'd need very fine equipment.

That's why digital is better. It can be very fine, very easily. It's nothing more than a stream of data. The more data, the finer the signal. The faster the processing chip, the more data. It's much easier to create a fast processing chip, just narrow the laser that etches it. Of course, you only make the signal as fine as you need it, which means it will break down very fast if you try to zoom in.

Digital signals are made up of the famous "ones and zeros" that we all hear about so much. But what are they anyway? Well, a "one" tells a circuit on the receiving end to open, and a "zero" tells it to close. These opening and closing circuits cause new ones and zeros to be made, and off they go.

Interlaced scans are the old method of displaying a picture. It's a series of half frames, between twenty-four and thirty, depending on where you live in the world. The frames are divided by many small rows, such as odd and even, with the following frame being the even rows. Never during this method does a complete frame show up on screen, but it all happens so fast, your brain doesn't notice the difference. This is very convenient a method, because you only need to send half the information for every frame.

Progressive scans are whole pictures at once, for each frame. The old CRT monitors, which means cathode ray tube, fired streams of electrons toward the back of the screen. It would be fired in the same pattern as the interlaced rows of lines, many times each second. HD screens can only receive information in one row at a time, for every frame.

Therefore, it's easy to see why analogue, although technically finer, is no longer practical, and interlaced video is just plain clunky. An HDMI cable is necessary to create the proper format.




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