Dear Geek,
At my kids’ urging, I finally replaced my old monitor. You know, the one that looks like Storm Trooper’s helmet… Anyways, my new monitor supports HDMI, VGA, and DVI inputs. What do these mean, and is one better than the other?
Signed,
No Longer A Star Wars Fan
Dear Fan,
First, a question…do you drive a Beetle and listen to Nirvana on your 12-disc CD changer? Secondly, for your kids’ sake, congrats on the upgrade! And third, you can’t fool us – if you’re comparing your monitor to a storm trooper, you are a die-hard Star Wars fan.
The biggest reason that monitors have all these inputs, is because the computer industry, in spite of it’s advances in the past 30 years, has not yet come up with a standard for cables.
Here’s the quick and easy tutorial on these inputs:
DVI (Digital Visual Interface): For the most part, all DVI cables work with uncompressed digital video. This means that the picture quality is not dependent on the quality of your cable. You either get a signal, or you don’t. DVI cables also only carry video, so if your monitor has built-in speakers, you’ll need separate wires for those.
HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface): HDMI has quickly grown in popularity, thanks to it’s compatibility with newer tvs, and it’s compact size. HDMI, is transmits uncompressed data (see explanation under DVI). However, HDMI also carries audio, which is great if your monitor has built-in speakers.
VGA (Video Graphics Array): VGA is probably the closest the computer industry came to a cable standard. VGA cables carries audio and video. However, video quality directly responds to cable quality, and more-so on higher resolutions. So video quality can vary depending on the brand of cable.
Long story short: HDMI and DVI cables support a higher resolution. HDMI and VGA carry both audio and video, while DVI only carries video.
If you have a question for our Resident Geek, send it to: geek@tbyd.ca. We’ll translate it from Geek-lish to English, so it actually helps!
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