I've seen a fair number of wireless HDMI devices, and most of them are short-range solutions because they use the 60GHz spectrum. IOGear's Wireless 5x2 HD Matrix goes one better because it uses the 5GHz spectrum and its signal can penetrate a few walls—making it more ideal for actual home usage.
With the 60GHz systems I've seen, the transmitter and receiver must be in the same room. That's fine for wirelessly streaming video from your Blu-ray player to your video projector, but it's useless when you want to stream video from a device in the living room to a TV in the kitchen. IOGear's HD Matrix, which is based on the WHDI (Wireless Home Digital Interface) standard, can handle both those missions. What's more, it can also send control signals from its receiver back to the devices plugged into its transmitter.
ROBERT CARDINThe Wireless 5x2 HD Matrix can switch between HDMI sources and one component video source, sending their output to a single receiver.
The 5x2 in the product's name indicates that the transmitter has five inputs (four HDMI and one analog component video plus stereo) and two outputs (one wired HDMI and one wireless HDMI). You plug the wired output into a nearby TV and send the wireless signal to the receiver connected to a TV in another room. The receiver has a single HDMI out. One of the HD Matrix's cooler features is that the transmitter and the receiver can switch sources independently: A TV plugged into the receiver can play video from the Blu-ray player, while the TV connected to the transmitter plays video from a cable- or satellite-TV set-top box, for instance.
The receiver has an input jack for an infrared receiver and a USB port for a mouse or keyboard. The transmitter has an output jack for an IR emitter and a USB port that you connect to a PC. This configuration allows you to remotely control a PC and up to five devices in your entertainment center (a Blu-ray player, A/V receiver, set-top box, or whatever else you might have). IOGear supplies both the IR receiver and emitters on cables, so that the HD Matrix transmitter and receiver can be located out of sight.
ROBERT CARDIN
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