Difference Between HDMI 1.2 and 1.3

HDMI 1.2 vs 1.3

HDMI stands for High Definition Multimedia Interface and is the emerging standard for HD digital transmission from one device, like a player or gaming console, to another, like a TV set. This standard has been revised constantly with version 1.3 being the latest. Its most significant, though not so useful, advantage to the older version 1.2 is in its higher bandwidth. This is not very useful as version 1.2 is already capable of handling 1080p, the highest resolution for HD video, and the higher bandwidth of 1.3 is just in preparation for future applications that can take advantage of the bandwidth.

HDMI 1.3 also adds support for a new feature called deep color or extended gamut. This is achieved by using more than 8 bits to represent a wider variety of colors. Even though a lot of hardware is now capable of using this feature, most of the content is encoded in 8 bits and no benefit can be observed. The most promising use of this feature is in video games, but even those are still somewhere in the future.

HDMI 1.2 is only capable of transmitting uncompressed digital audio, which might be a bit of a problem if your player is not capable of decompressing Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD. HDMI 1.3 adds support for the transmission of these two audio formats to transfer the load of uncompressing these formats to the destination device.

Prior to HDMI 1.3, the HDMI connector in existence is the standard size. HDMI 1.3 introduced the mini connector which is ideal for smaller devices like camcorders and digital cameras. HDMI 1.3 introduced the auto lip syncing capability that is absent in HDMI 1.2. This feature eliminates the occurrence of the audio and video being out of sync. This occurs due to the different paths that the audio and video data takes as they need to undergo processing and decoding. HDMI 1.2 is quite prone to this problem, which resulted in a fix in HDMI 1.3

Summary:
1. HDMI 1.3 has a higher bandwidth and is capable of higher data rates compared to HDMI 1.2
2. HDMI 1.3 adds a new feature called deep color, which is absent in HDMI 1.2
3. HDMI 1.3 supports the transmission of Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD master audio streams while HDMI 1.2 does not
4. HDMI 1.3 introduced the mini connector
5. HDMI 1.3 introduces auto lip syncing capability not found on HDMI 1.2

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