Walk into any electronics shop and the wall of HDMI cables will promise you numbers. Only two of those numbers are names the industry actually recognises: Ultra High Speed, which carries up to 48Gbps and arrived with HDMI 2.1 in 2020, and Ultra96, which carries up to 96Gbps and arrived with the HDMI 2.2 specification released on 25 June 2025.
The Ultra96 name on a television or receiver means the device supports 64, 80 or 96Gbps under the new specification. The HDMI Forum requires an Ultra96 cable alongside it, because a slower lead quietly drags the device down to whatever the wire can carry.
Most homes do not need the top number. HDMI 2.2 reaches 12K at 120 frames and 16K at 60, and 8K at 60 or 4K at 240 with full colour sampling at 10-bit and 12-bit depth. A 4K television running at 120 frames is comfortably served by a 48Gbps Ultra High Speed lead, which is cheaper and far easier to find.
The packaging, though, can claim anything. So certification is not optional: every model is tested at an HDMI Forum Authorised Testing Centre, and the manufacturer must then fix a certification label to each package, carrying the official cable-name logo and a QR code.
That code is the part worth using. Scan it with any ordinary QR reader and it returns the brand, the model number and the length. The programme also keeps testing after the fact — samples are bought off shelves and retested — and a model that passes the audit shows that in the scan result too.
So there is one step before you pay. Find the label, scan it, and read what comes back. A cable with no label, or a code that returns a model and length different from the one in your hand, is selling you a number rather than proving one.
Photograph: an HDMI cable with gold-plated connectors. Photo by Electronicgrup, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: HDMI Forum and hdmi.org.
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