You finally made the leap and invested in a shiny new 4K TV, but now you’re hearing all sorts of chatter about “HDR this” and “Dolby Vision that.” You just spent a bunch of a new TV, so you obviously want to know all about the latest craze.
In a nutshell, HDR—which stands for High Dynamic Range—is a type of content that is specially designed to push your HDR-compatible TV to its limit. Highlights are brighter, shadows are darker, and everything looks more lifelike and colorful.
Do I need new HDMI cables for HDR?
Maybe.
To send 4K and HDR content over an HDMI cable, you need to make sure that both the TV and whatever it’s hooked up to support HDMI 2.0a. Luckily, older HDMI cablesshould work just fine with these new HDMI 2.0a devices—most of the time—since the cables are physically the same. Older cables just may not have enough bandwidth to support sending that much information at once, in which case you’ll need newer HDMI 2.0a cables.
Our advice would be to try out your existing cables before you spend money on new ones you don’t need. Or at the very least, keep those receipts!