If you’ve been a fan of consumer electronics over the years, you’ve seen all sorts of connectivity technology come and go. Depending on how old you are, you may be familiar with RF technology. If you have experience with electronics from the 80’s, you’re also likely more than a bit familiar with the rats’ nest of coaxial cable that used to be required to connect everything together. The past two decades have seen the development of VGA, composite video technology, super video, SCART, D-Terminal, and more.
However, this proliferation of different types of connectivity equipment and cabling has not been easy for the end user to adapt to. Indeed, the bewildering variety of external accessories and adapters which needs to be pieced together to form a complete solution can be elusive to assemble for even the most technologically adept among us at times.
Enter HDBaseT.
What is HDBaseT, you ask? In a nutshell, it is a new connectivity technology designed to alleviate many of the problems consumers are currently facing with their home electronics. With this technology, one single cable is now able to do the work of nearly a dozen old connectivity technologies.
HDBaseT cabling can:
- Deliver full, uncompressed HD video, either to a network or a single point. It also supports all legacy products, is gaming-ready, and adds no latency to the transmission. It supports both television and personal computer graphics formats.
- Transmit audio with perfect fidelity. All standard formats are supported, and the transmission itself is ultimately delivered through the same media as visual content.
- Support a full 100BaseT Ethernet signal, meaning that your television, computer, stereo, or any other piece of consumer electronics can be connected into your local
- network, and communicate with your other devices.
- Actually power devices. It delivers 100 watts of power using standard Cat5e/Cat6 cable, and can passively extend up to 100m. Considering a 40” television set connected using HDBaseT uses only 70 watts, this is a relatively impressive load.
- Distribute control signals. HDBaseT also has the full array of standard control signals available, such as powering on and off, play versus stop, and more, including RS232, USB, and IR controls.
In addition to all this, it even uses standard Ethernet connectors. Because of all of these added advantages, electronics experts are predicting that this format will eventually overtake HDMI in popularity. What is HDBaseT? The future.
