Edimax WD-1000TR Wireless WHDI Caster Review

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With the current trend of home users having large flat screen TVs mounted on their walls, or even having a ceiling mounted projector for that matter, most people start to find that a mass of cables coming down to their DVD players, games consoles & media centres etc is very unsightly. Edimax have created a solution to this problem with the WHDI caster, which removes the need to have an HDMI cable (or two) running up and down the wall.

The WD1000-TR is a very simple yet effective solution to this unassumingly simple problem, by having a transmitter that connects to the source and a receiver that can be mounted near to the TV or up next to a projector, eliminating the need for those unwanted cables. The WD1000-TR supports full HD resolutions as well as AC-3 & DTS audio streaming, and also boasts a less than 1ms latency for those gamers that would otherwise worry about any lag during play.

The WHDI Caster comes in a dark teal coloured box and on the front lists a brief run down of what its function is.  Along the bottom, there is a highlight of devices that are supported, including games consoles, media players and projectors. 

The back of the box shows us how the caster would be installed on both the transmitter and receiver ends. Below this is indicated which type of mains plug is included for use in different countries.

Paperwork wise, there is a multi language quick installation guide for setting up the system and this also comes on a CD with the user manual.

Alongside the transmitter and receiver, there are two power adaptors; one with mini USB and one with a DC jack, a small ~6″ HMDI cable, a longer length HDMI cable and a USB Y-cable for powering the transmitter directly off USB instead of the mains.

On the rear of the transmitter is an HDMI port for connecting the source device to and also a mini-USB for power, either by the mains plug or the included USB Y-cable.

[/wpcol_1half][wpcol_1half_end id=”” class=”” style=””]The receiver unit is far larger in length and width to the transmitter, but this does contain more inside including the antenna and the graphics card to reproduce the image on screen.  On the front are two buttons, one being the power and the other for bringing up the OSD with a quick press or for changing the channel (long press) if there is interference from other nearby devices.

On the rear of the receiver is an HDMI port, DC power jack and a mini-USB service port although this has no use to the end user.

On the rear of the receiver are two screw holes for mounting to a wall.  This would be most beneficial where the receiving source is a wall mounted TV or a projector mounted on the ceiling.

Setup is a simple as connecting the transmitter to the source device (in our case a laptop for testing) and then connecting the other half to a TV or projector. As soon as the power is on, the receiver automatically searches for and locks onto the WHDI signal and that is it!  No further setup is required.  The only intervention that may be required on the receiver end is changing the receiving channel in the event that another device in the vicinity of the receiver is operating on the sane 5Ghz band is therefore potentially interfering with the signal.  This would be noticed with either loss of sound or distortion in the image that is reproduced. There are not many tests as such than can be done with a device of this type, but to check how well things worked, I streamed an array of content from a colour enriched HD movie (in this case Toy Story 3) to a fast moving film, then playing Rock Band 3 (for any latency and decoding delay) and finally by streaming audio content across to look for any loss in audio quality.

Throughout all the testing it was hard to notice that the source was not directly connected to the TV at all, even by placing the transmitter further away to take into account different situations of setup showed no real difference.  During game play where the milliseconds of latency can make a difference – especially in Rock Band – there was little to no difference in the experience had.  To double check this, I re-calibrated my guitar with the TV a number of times with both the caster connected and without and the average difference between the two was a mere 2 milliseconds, oh so close to the <1ms latency that the WD1000-TR claims to offer.

The WHDI Caster worked very well upto its specified range of 10m after which the receiver was unable to locate a signal to lock onto.  I did also note that having the transmitter in a neighbouring room did affect the signal, however in a real world scenario, the system is going to be setup in a way that this would not be an issue to most users.

So all in all, why would you want one of these devices? Surely its far easier to run a cable from point to point?  Well in a nut shell yes it is, however, there are the situations where you don’t want to be running loads of cables up your wall to the TV and in an corporate environment for example its not necessarily practical to keep reaching up to a ceiling mounted projector to connect a laptop or other media device.

The Edimax WD-100TR is available for £111.56 which may seem a lot to some of us, but what we have to consider is that the other options that are available on the market vary from £100 right up to the £450 mark. For this reason we can safely say that the Edimax WD1000-TR is priced very competitively and its performance for this price in comparison to the competition is outstanding.

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