The HDMI Forum, the governing organization that creates specifications for (you guessed it) HDMI cables, has officially released the next version of the HDMI standard: HDMI 2.1. The new standard was first announced earlier this year at CES 2017, but has now been finalized and released to companies to start integrating into devices.
The new standard supports a whole host of new video outputs including 4K video at 120Hz and 8K video at 60Hz, along with support for video at 10K resolution. But good luck finding anything to watch in that resolution. This time-lapse from photographer Joe Capra is probably the only thing around that can even attempt to approximate the format.
As my colleague James Vincent pointed out when he first covered the specification back in January, HDMI 2.1 is more a future-facing update than one that will directly affect current devices, seeing as we’re still just starting to reach the point where 4K video is becoming commonplace, to say nothing of 8K resolution or technologies like dynamic HDR video that HDMI 2.1 in theory will be able to support.
Still, since the standard is fully backwards compatible with current HDMI devices, it’s likely that we’ll start seeing the new spec crop up on devices going forward. And maybe one day, technology for video and displays will finally catch up and we’ll actually be able to fully take advantage of everything HDMI 2.1 has to offer.