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In Memoriam: VGA (hackaday.com)

szczys writes: VGA is going away. It has been for a long time but the final nails in the coffin are being driven home this year. It was the first standard for video, and is by far the longest-lived port on the PC. The extra pins made computers monitor-aware; allowing data about the screen type and resolution to be queried whenever a display was connected. But the connector is big and looks antiquated. There's no place for it in today's thin, design minded devices. It is also a mechanism for analog signaling in our world that has embraced high-speed digital for ever increasing pixels and integration of more data passing through one connection. Most motherboards no longer have the connector, and Intel's new Skylake processors have removed native VGA functionality. Even online retailers have stopped including it as a filter option when choosing hardware.

8 of 406 comments (clear)

  1. HDMI=mostly disadvantages by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sure the world must move on some day, but I'd like to point out that at least for me HDMI has only ever brought disadvantages. Apart from severe problems with dealing with several audio channels or routing audio to external analog speakers, it also had and still has the charming property of turning the whole display black for 1-2 seconds from time to time. Not to speak of countless problems with false colors and red-tinted display on my Philips TV.

    Frankly speaking, after years of using it I have come to the conclusion that HDMI is just shit in comparison to analog VGA, no matter how much seemingly more clear the display may be. I believe it was mainly forced on everyone for introducing DRM crap and to sell expensive cables and VGA would do well enough. Digital is not always the best.

  2. Re:Eventually... But not yet by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I still see it on monitors and TVs.

    And projectors! How else can I connect to those projectors if not VGA? And their life-span is probably decades. I think the new projectors actually have alternatives to VGA optional, but usually this is HDMI, which I predict is going away sooner than VGA. (HDMI being replaced by DP)

  3. RIP DVI... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I was looking at new monitors recently. Seems like DVI is going away than VGA. Many monitors have VGA, HDMI and occasionally DisplayPort connectors. The only two connectors I use in my home network is VGA for servers and HDMI for everything else.

  4. I was thinking about VGA the other day by Tuor · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's still almost everywhere. At work we still have VGA monitors and docks. The monitor also has a digital connector of some kind, but never more than two other flavors. My TVs have VGA.

    You know what's great about VGA sticking around? Older equipment that was often expensive and built like a tank still works. Projectors, CRTs, and KVMs. I've seen retrocomputer enthusiasts build VGA adapters for all kinds of old systems. It's nice to have something that you can rely on when you're traveling; if you have a VGA dongle you know you can work.

    I hope VGA has a couple more decades in it, and with the slow adoption of 4K TVs, it just might.

    --
    I love my computer -- You make me feel alright (Bad Religion)
  5. Re:It was the first standard for video? by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    One of those people who think that everything can be done on a smartphone.

    I had a friend who gave me an expensive Asus wireless router because he made a change to the configuration from his iPad that locked out his iPad. He refused to reset the router to factory settings and use my laptop to configure the settings via a wired connection. It had to be done through the iPad only. No matter how I tried to explain what he wanted wasn't realistic, it had to be done the way he wanted it done. He want back to using the Comcast modem, which had an external button for turning on the wireless.

  6. I'll stick with VGA and SDI as long as possible by blind+biker · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Why? Because FUCK HDMI, that's why. I want my video port to send the video signal to my monitor without hand-shaking, asking for permissions and assuming I'm a pirate and kitten-murderer. HDMI takes so many rights and adds so many potential problems, that I find it hard to accept its presence in any of my devices. I have a ThinkPad with HDMI, but sure as hell am not going to use it.

    --
    "The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
  7. Re: It was the first standard for video? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hmm...interesting. Actually it seems that timothy has been the publisher of every article for almost 3 days.

  8. Re: It was the first standard for video? by whipslash · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Give us some time my friend. It's been 72 hours. It's not easy to fix a site that's almost two decades old.