It appears that Outlaw considers this an issue that needs to be thoroughly addressed, because I got a second e-mail response this morning to the question I asked them on early Thursday. While they were at the show in New York this weekend, they picked a few brains at Silicon Optix about the issue of digital video switching and such. Silicon Optix concurred with Outlaw that the 990's switching would be fully compatible with HDMI components - all you need is an adapter or two.

There was also a comment from that discussion that intrigued me, although in light of the 990's pass-through switching it isn't really an issue either way for the 990. According to Silicon Optix (who should know better than anyone), all consumer-grade digital video formats currently available or in development (including Blu-Ray) are 8-bit. 10-bit digital video is limited to a few very pricey commercial platforms. Clearly, this does not match well with some of the information from sources such as Secrets (including this article ). It sounds to me like some HDMI source devices are manipulating 8-bit data in a manner that isn't behaving well with DVI displays. (In fact, JJ at Secrets referred to the whole as being due to the fact that "There is a bug in the Silicon Image HDMI transmitter".) It makes me wonder if, in light of the significant number of DVI displays that have been manufactured and sold over the last two or three years there may be an effort to improve this behavior. That's probably being a bit overly optimistic, but still... It also leads me to suspect that future HDMI devices (HD receivers and HD disc players like HD-DVD, Blu-Ray, or a unified standard) will simply pass the original 8-bit signal without any manipulation (similar to the way they pass digital audio now), eliminating the potential HDMI/DVI conflict.