Looking for the HDMI port on your new laptop? You probably won’t find it. Instead you’ll find a new type of port many people have not heard of and have mistakenly tried to jam an HDMI cable into, the DisplayPort.
Similar to HDMI, DisplayPort can transmit high-definition Audio and Video over a single cable at speeds up to 17.28Gb/s (Gigabit, not Gigabyte). Many manufacturers such as HP, IBM, and Dell are switching to DisplayPort mainly because of the licensing cost. DisplayPort is currently royalty free, where HDMI charges manufacturers 4 cents per device plus an annual fee of $10,000 for high volume manufacturers. HP announced that it believes that DisplayPort will completely display VGA by 2013. They have already started shipping out monitors that only support this new technology. DisplayPort and HDMI are both interoperable simply by using a DisplayPort to HDMI cable as long as your DisplayPort is a Dual Mode DisplayPort.
Look for the following logo when shopping for a laptop that has a Display Port to ensure compatibility if you ever need to plug it in to an HDMI enabled TV or Monitor.
Written By: Amardeep Juneja