DVI stands for Digital Video Interface, a digital interface developed by a consortium of computer industry
leaders called the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). It was designed to provide an industry standard digital connection between a personal computer and a desktop display.
What are the advantages of DVI?
Traditional CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) displays use an analogue signal to receive image data from the computers graphics card. For this reason, early graphics
cards needed to convert their native digital signal into analogue in order to support CRT monitors.
LCD monitors are digital display devices, but when they were first introduced they needed to
be able to accept and adapt this analogue signal to ensure compatibility with the majority of available computers. In order for the LCD to accept the computer's analogue output, the signal had to
be reconverted to digital.
Since both the computer and the LCD digital monitor accept and transmit digital signals, the process of translating digital to analogue is fundamentally unnecessary.
The DVI digital connection removes this digital – analogue – digital conversion process, and so removes inaccuracies and information loss due to each conversion process.
DVI, being a digital interface suffers none of the problems traditionally associated with analogue interfaces, such as noise, “sparkles”, “ghosting”,
“snow”, poor colour matching and “softness” caused by loss of sharpness.
The DVI interface has proven to be extremely versatile; its two connectors
provide manufacturers with the flexibility to support digital devices while remaining backwards compatible with analogue devices.
DVI Connection Types
To provide backwards
compatibility with analogue displays. The DDWG specified that the DVI connector should accommodate both analogue and digital interfaces; this is implemented in the DVI-I (DVI-Integrated)
connector. A different connector DVI-D (DVI-Digital) is also specified and this handles digital only signals.
