The world of standards is rarely to be entered by the faint-hearted but the arrival of the HDMI 2.0 specification at last week’s IFA raised an unusually high number of questions and issues which will likely dominate the next few months of Ultra HD TV marketing. It’s difficult to know where to start: I’ll simply state that the HDMI Forum which oversees implementation of the standard does not want any of its members to tell consumers which standard they are buying. Its view is that it is up to manufacturers to tell customers about the specific features of devices without worrying them about specification numbers.

This all sounds very well in theory. In practice, however, two of the HDMI Forum’s most important members actively promoted HDMI 2.0 under its very noses during the IFA event. Sony was the most flagrant transgressor, hitting the headlines by claiming that its current and soon-to-be-launched UHD TVs would be upgradeable to HDMI 2.0 via a firmware upgrade. Panasonic also displayed support for HDMI 2.0 on its stand.

There isn’t enough space here to go into the all the reasons why this matters: I’ve saved that for our clients, who can read a detailed report shortly. Suffice it say that anyone thinking of buying a UHD TV in the next few months is going to get confused very quickly if they try to compare different brands, models and features. And whatever a company says about HDMI features and specifications, you need to read the fine print, and good luck finding it.

David Mercer