To DVI or not to DVI

[bob4432]

i just bought a samsung 730b 17" lcd and it has a dvi input. my x800xtpe has a dvi output. i am currently running the monitor via vga and i think it looks excellent, very comparable to the crt it replaced (viewsonice a90f+).

is there really an improvement in video quality going with a dvi connection over the standard vga connection? or is there some placebo effect?

i have d/l and installed 3dmark01 and ran the demo, knowing i would be 100fps easy, and the monitor has absolutely no ghosting whatsoever...

 

[xtknight]

Definitely hook it up via DVI. There's a definite text clarity difference. I had a 710T and it was quite a noticeable difference going from VGA to DVI, even in contrast.

 

[Fox5]

Yeah, DVI is much better, especially on cheaper monitors. There's no reason not ot use it, it's just better.

Oh, and I don't think the fps causes blurring, but rather the actual speed of the images. You can have a still image refreshed at 100fps and there will be no blurring, or you could have a movie of a jet fighter plane zooming across the screen at 24fps and have tons of blurring.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: xtknight
Definitely hook it up via DVI. There's a definite text clarity difference. I had a 710T and it was quite a noticeable difference going from VGA to DVI, even in contrast.

any place in particular to get a cheap dvi cable?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Fox5
Yeah, DVI is much better, especially on cheaper monitors. There's no reason not ot use it, it's just better.

Oh, and I don't think the fps causes blurring, but rather the actual speed of the images. You can have a still image refreshed at 100fps and there will be no blurring, or you could have a movie of a jet fighter plane zooming across the screen at 24fps and have tons of blurring.

the demo in 01 has numerous images flying around at very high speeds...

 

[imhungry]

Will DVI have a noticable affect on clarity with a 19'' CRT?

Thanks.

 

[bob4432]

being the cheap bastard that i am, and having many dvi-vga adapters, could one put one adapter on each end of a vga cable and use that??

 

[Peter]

No, because these adapters don't do signal conversion - they just give you the analog copy of the signal from the DVI-I output jack (which carries both an analog and digital copy of the same feed).

 

[ElFenix]

i did a little experiment hooking both the vga and dvi from my 9800 to the vga and dvi in of my 2005. now, i didn't mess around with the nga settings at all, so take the results with a grain of salt. but with vga it appeared that the text would go from normal to bold, normal to bold, in vertical bands across the monitor. the text looked fatter in certain areas than in others. dvi did not have that effect. now, as i said before, i didn't mess with the vga settings at all, so it is possible that the text could have been corrected. but, if you have your monitor adjusted so that everything looks perfect, i'm not sure that a dvi cable would do you any good.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Definitely do DVI. You've got the connections so all you need is the cable which can be found for $10.

I own two 710T's and I owned a 730B before; although they look very good over analog (Samsung screens are among the best for VGA usage), text is just clearer and sharper over DVI. You will appreciate the difference over time.

 

[bob4432]

another question - i want to run a kvm. i have seen these in with vga for the video, do they offer a dvi version?

second, where do you get the cable for $10? i went to cc and office depot and they wanted ~$75.

 

[Steve]

Text - $15 at Outpost.com, probably at Fry's for the same price. Otherwise try pricewatch, froogle, FS/FT, eBay.

 

[arcas]

I'm going to have to go against popular opinion and say VGA. In my experience (6800gs, Dell 2005fpw), VGA is noticibly sharper than DVI. I'll qualify this by saying that my comparison involved using a thick 3rd party VGA cable versus the Dell-supplied DVI cable. The Dell cable seems kind of wimpy but given that DVI is digital I'm not whether how much a role cable thickness plays (after all, companies have demonstrated 10-Gbit ethernet over cat5e...that would yield around 233fps @ 1680x1050@24bit). Maybe one of these days I'll borrow a "better" DVI cable and repeat my tests...

 

[bob4432]

if the vga connection is equal to or nearly equal to(within 95%) what i had with the crt, can a lcd be crisper than a crt?

 

[n7]

I personally see no difference with DVI vs. VGA on 17/19" LCDs.

I don't really think the 1280x1024 resolution needs more bandwidth.

However, on my 20" LCD (1600x1200), i do certainly agree that DVI is imperative.

 

[Fox5]

Originally posted by: n7
I personally see no difference with DVI vs. VGA on 17/19" LCDs.

I don't really think the 1280x1024 resolution needs more bandwidth.

However, on my 20" LCD (1600x1200), i do certainly agree that DVI is imperative.

On my 19" LCD I notice a huge difference with DVI. However, I had a cheapy LCD, only around $400.

 

[xtknight]

Originally posted by: bob4432
if the vga connection is equal to or nearly equal to(within 95%) what i had with the crt, can a lcd be crisper than a crt?

An LCD with DVI will always be the best. Nothing is better than digital for transmission.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: arcas
I'm going to have to go against popular opinion and say VGA. In my experience (6800gs, Dell 2005fpw), VGA is noticibly sharper than DVI. I'll qualify this by saying that my comparison involved using a thick 3rd party VGA cable versus the Dell-supplied DVI cable. The Dell cable seems kind of wimpy but given that DVI is digital I'm not whether how much a role cable thickness plays (after all, companies have demonstrated 10-Gbit ethernet over cat5e...that would yield around 233fps @ 1680x1050@24bit). Maybe one of these days I'll borrow a "better" DVI cable and repeat my tests...

And I'm going to have to go with the opinion that something changed between your tests. There is no way that VGA would be "sharper" than DVI unless some artifical "sharpening" was enabled in your monitor's control panel that only affected the analog connection (I've seen that before, not sure if Dell has such a thing in the 2005fp), or if some text smoothing setting got changed (or maybe was set for normal anti-aliasing which made the LCD look blurry, since the LCD would probably look "sharper" with ClearType).

Anyway, DVI, being digital, will not "degrade gracefully" as analog can. You'll either have everything or nothing (or maybe something but with major artifacts). If you have a video card with crappy quality DVI transmission, you might experience weird artifacts that come and go, but blurrier text than analog? Not with proper settings at native resolution!