To be “charitable” to HDMI, in its 23-year lifespan, it’s only seen 6 major and 4 minor revisions. The minor revisions are way too frequent, but at least the newer cables are compatible with devices using the older HDMI standard.
To be uncharitable to HDMI cable manufacturers, the shitty ones are causing major problems for consumers, exasperating the problem of HDMI being inconsistently functional:
The maximum length of an HDMI 2.0 cable is 50 feet before signal degradation starts to cause problems in high bandwidth applications. You can find 100ft “HDMI 2.0” cables all over Amazon, and I guarantee they won’t be able to do 4k120hz or 8k30hz without issues.
HDMI pin 18 is +5V power, which is barely ever used in cases where someone is connecting a source device directly to a sink device. Some manufacturers try to save on material costs by not including a wire for it and not mentioning that little omission. DisplayPort has the same issue. Guess what happens to devices when using a cable with the power pin connected and no protection for backfeeding? (Hint: an RMA. On that note, fuck Dell.)
Manufacturers selling cables without actually labeling the cable itself with the specification version. We all have a drawer of old HDMI cables, most of them won’t work for an 8K TV, and half of those you’ll only find out through trial and error.
I actually don’t have as much of an issue with the mini/micro variants of the connectors themselves. It’s pretty easy to find a passive adapter in most cases, and they mostly work fine as long as you aren’t trying to feed 4K over long distances or high refresh rates through them.
I dunno man, hdmi has 400 different cable standards and then microhdmi on top.
Don’t forget miniHDMI!
To be “charitable” to HDMI, in its 23-year lifespan, it’s only seen 6 major and 4 minor revisions. The minor revisions are way too frequent, but at least the newer cables are compatible with devices using the older HDMI standard.
To be uncharitable to HDMI cable manufacturers, the shitty ones are causing major problems for consumers, exasperating the problem of HDMI being inconsistently functional:
The maximum length of an HDMI 2.0 cable is 50 feet before signal degradation starts to cause problems in high bandwidth applications. You can find 100ft “HDMI 2.0” cables all over Amazon, and I guarantee they won’t be able to do 4k120hz or 8k30hz without issues.
HDMI pin 18 is +5V power, which is barely ever used in cases where someone is connecting a source device directly to a sink device. Some manufacturers try to save on material costs by not including a wire for it and not mentioning that little omission. DisplayPort has the same issue. Guess what happens to devices when using a cable with the power pin connected and no protection for backfeeding? (Hint: an RMA. On that note, fuck Dell.)
Manufacturers selling cables without actually labeling the cable itself with the specification version. We all have a drawer of old HDMI cables, most of them won’t work for an 8K TV, and half of those you’ll only find out through trial and error.
I actually don’t have as much of an issue with the mini/micro variants of the connectors themselves. It’s pretty easy to find a passive adapter in most cases, and they mostly work fine as long as you aren’t trying to feed 4K over long distances or high refresh rates through them.
I didn’t come here to be educated! I’m here to be unreasonable!