The dark days of tethering your laptop to a three-foot HDMI cable in order to throw a little YouTube, South Park or Hulu up on the big screen may soon be over. And no, the answer is not a $1,500 home theater PC. Amimon unveiled a solution on Tuesday with the WHDI Stick, a wireless HD transmitter that plugs into any computer and transmits full HD signals to a television. The company bills it as the smallest such device on the market, potentially making it more much practical than some of the behemoths we’ve seen before.
Because it simply takes standard digital signals in on one end and spits them out on the other, the WDHI stick requires no drivers: Just plug one end into an HDMI output and the other end into an HDMI input. The transmitting end does require a USB cable for power, though.
Amimom claims the WHDI Stick introduces less than one millisecond of latency, which should make it practical for big-screen gaming from a laptop, and broadcasts up to 100 feet. Like all WHDI products, it uses a 40MHz channel in the 5GHz unlicensed band, which gives it enough bandwidth to broadcast full, uncompressed images to the screen. It will even support all the same 3D formats as a standard HDMI 1.4a cable and HDCP revision 2.0.
The company won’t sell the WHDI Stick directly, but OEMs should be selling different versions of it by the first quarter of 2011, probably for around $150.
