“It’s Alive….It’s Alive”

In the rush to jump on the high definition television bandwagon, Honeywell has introduced an HDMI cable that they claim is “self healing”. According to Engadget, Honeywell’s CurexE cable has some sort of error coding built into it that uses inline LED’s to show whether the signal chain is transmitting the correct info to your HD device. It’s hard to understand how they can all the device “self healing” as it has no ability to address problems at either end of the the data transmission so it can’t really “heal” anything.  At best, it can only diagnose what may be wrong with the components it connects.  And that’s on a good day!

Frankly, this item looks like it was developed by the marketing department rather than engineering. Here’s how this product is described in Honeywell’s own press release:

“We’ve made this cable intelligent by integrating a chip into the connector that performs two major functions,” said David Coleman, Program Manager, CE Cable Products, Honeywell. “First, the chip’s line driver ‘cures’ corrupted HDCP and EDID data that can lead to serious audio and video artifacts. Second, we added ‘light’ in the form of LEDs embedded into the connector that let installers monitor the most critical elements of the HDMI interface for problems.”

The parentheses around “cure” are theirs and their description of the “cure” doesn’t really shed much light on this voodoo.

As the broadcast industry approaches the deadline of 2009’s conversion to digital television, a lot of consumers are going to be taken to the cleaners by televion accessory makers who bring very little value to the table. Honeywell’s CurexE cable looks like one of these offerings.

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