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HDMI Vs Display Port Vs VGA Vs DVI fully explained

HDMI Vs Display Port Vs VGA Vs DVI:

HDMI DISPLAY PORT VGA DVI- You might have heard the terms HDMI, VGS, DVI, and Display Port. In this article we are going to discuss each one in detail and in the end you will know exactly which one is the best. It is obviously very simple to connect your screen to computer, you just take the cable, you plug it into the back of the computer, and you plug the other end into your screen. But what many people don’t really think about is, what kind of cable is used to do so. The DVD players, TV, game consoles, computer system in order to show its video signal on monitor or flat screen. We use different types of standards. We are going to start with the VGA.



VGA (Video graphic array):

Let’s start off with oldest technology which is VGA. A VGA connector usually looks like this:

HDMI DISPLAY PORT VGA DVI

It consists of male port and having two screws on the Left and Right sides for connection. It is kind of a bulky connector and also called D-SUB. It is blue and has got a screw type locking mechanism and a signal that VGA carries is an old fashioned analog video signal that a problem with an analog video signal is that there can be loss of quality. Now if you have a 720p screen or a screen has a lower resolution in 720pa VGA cable will do fine and the image quality will look just fine as well, but when you have a screen that has a higher resolution and 720p or maybe even Full HD or even higher than that you will see that the image starts to get kind of blurry and this is the thing with VGA, it can virtually support any screen resolution you want but the higher you set the resolution the blurrier the image quality becomes, and that’s because it uses an analog video signal but of course if you have a small screen and you do not have a lot of money then VGA is a perfect solution for you also it’s locking mechanism is a really nice feature because it prevents you from accidentally disconnecting your cable from your computer or your monitor. When we increase the length of the wire the video signal will be degrade. The picture quality it is not very good because we convert analog signal in to digital signal. The maximum display of the VGA is 2048×1536 pixels at 60 Hertz.There will be problem if we want to show display above this resolution.




DVI (Digital video interface):

DVI connectors look like this:

HDMI DISPLAY PORT VGA DVI

DVI Connectors are pretty similar to VGA ones and leaver have more pins. They are even bigger they are even bulkie rand they use the exact same locking mechanism. The main advantage of DVI is that it uses a fully digital video signal that a nice thing about a digital video signal is that the quality does not degrade as you up the resolution.If we have compatible adapters we can use DVI with VGA and HMI. There are two different versions of DVI there is DVI single link and dual link. Now differences that dual link DVI version has basically got more pins and therefore it has got more bandwidth and it supports a higher resolution. Single-link DVI goes up to 1900×1200 pixels at 60 Hertz or 60 frames per second but dual link DVI goes up to 2560×1600 at 60Hertz or 60 frames-per-second and again even at those resolutions the quality does not go down. You do not get a blurry image, you get a perfectly sharp imag equality. So, a DVI you get a nice solid locking mechanism and great sharp image quality only it does not go above 2560×1600 pixels. If you want an even bigger screen and it is just a very big bulky connector.

HDMI (High definition multimedia interface):

HDMI consists of two types of ports one is HDMI 1.4 and the other is HDMI 2.0 which is commonly used today. Normally in TV and monitor we see this type of ports. HDMI is comparatively very cheap. HDMI connector looks like this:

HDMI DISPLAY PORT VGA DVI

It is much smaller and slimmer than VGA and DVI, but it still has the same image quality as DVI since it uses the same kind of digital video signal. Now HDMI has a few more advantages HDMI1.4 supports of resolutions up to 4k so that is 4096×2160 at 24 Hertz and 3840×2160 at 30 Hertz and 1080px120 Hertz. HDMI 2.0 actually supports 4k at 60 Hertz and later versions (HDMI 2.0a and 2.0b) include support for HDR and again it all does it without loss of quality so no blurry images like with VGA what is also really nice about HDMI is that it also carries sound. The speed of HDMI 1.4 is 10 Gbits /s and the speed of HDMI 2.0 is 18 Gbits/s. So you do not need to connect separate cable for the sound. So if you do not have separate speakers for your computer HDMI also carries an audio signal so then you can actually use the speakers in your screen or TV if they have speakers but HDMI supports 8 channel audio so that is a really nice feature as well a drawback of HDMI is that it doesn’t have a locking mechanism it plugs into the port just like a USB device it can be pulled out of its socket pretty easily which is a slight drawback.



Display port:

Display port connector looks like this:

HDMI DISPLAY PORT VGA DVI

Display Port is kind of like an HDMI plug only it does have a locking mechanism, not as solid as the locking mechanism for DVI and VGA but it’s still quite good, also the technology that it uses is quite impressive. The display port 1.4 supports 4K at 120 Hz and 8K at 60 Hz and HDR. Similarly, display port 2.0 supports 16K with HDR at 60 Hertz and 10K without HDR at 80 Hertz. So first of all Display Port has got insane bandwidth so much bandwidth in fact that the current version of this plate port support supports up to 8K resolutions at 60 Hertz or 60 frames per second that is so high that there is not even a screen out there at the moment of recording this that supports those kinds of resolutions on top of that display port supports technologies like AMD’s free sync and Nvidia g-sync. Display Port carries an audio signal just like HDMI and on top of that it is also really good for people who have a lot of screens connected to one computer you see if you use an older port such as HDMI or DVI or VGA you need two ports on the computer to use two monitors. You can try to connect two monitors to one HDMI port or one DVI port but then you get a cloned image. So each monitor will display the same thing because the video signal is simply cloned by your splitter, well with Display Port that is not the case you can actually buy a little hub that you can then plug into the display port and then you can plug up to three displays into the hub and you will be able to use them like this so you can use multiple screens with only one display port. So if you have three display ports on acomputer you can connect up to nine displays. It has got a locking mechanism, it carries an audio signal, it supports the latest technologies, and supports multiple screens on one port and technically display port is the best but screens and computers and other hardware for that matter that support Display Port can be expensive.

So I would say that most people don’t need to supply port actually HDMI or DVI is probably going to be fine for the majority of people out there also I don’t recommend you use VGA because again if you go above 720p resolution you’re just going to see that it gets kind of blurry.

Engr Fahad

My name is Shahzada Fahad and I am an Electrical Engineer. I have been doing Job in UAE as a site engineer in an Electrical Construction Company. Currently, I am running my own YouTube channel "Electronic Clinic", and managing this Website. My Hobbies are * Watching Movies * Music * Martial Arts * Photography * Travelling * Make Sketches and so on...

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