3/23/2011

Why We Need An HDMI Cable In This Day And Age

By Areelitaha Joahlanski


An HDMI cable is necessary in today's world. High Definition Multimedia Interface uses a digital signal to create progressive scanning images. But what does that mean?

Analogue signals are varying amounts of current traveling up the wire. By alternating the amount of current many times a second, information can be relayed. Analogue, as opposed to digital, is truly high resolution. An analogue current, being a simple stream of electrons moving through a conductive surface such as copper, can be divided or narrowed down to nano-sized degrees. It stops being practical, however, because it would take finer and finer components to control the variations at such sizes.

A digital signal can be much finer than an analogue signal without finer and finer components. It's a stream of data, made finer with faster and faster processing power. This stream of data can be used to describe anything, from a series of images on a screen, to a music piece, to a written novel.

The ubiquitous "ones and zeros" that people are always talking about make up digital signals, but what is that really? "Ones" tell circuits on a processor to open, and "zeros" tell it to close. Since a computer is really nothing more than an input-output device, those opening and closing circuits are just making more ones and zeros for another piece of the hardware.

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.

An HDMI cable can send all this data, which can be created quickly without the need of finer components.




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