DVI

The Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video connector designed to maximize the visual quality of digital display devices such as flat panel LCD computer displays and digital projectors. It was developed by an industry consortium, the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). more...

Overview

Previous standards such as VGA were designed for CRT-based devices and thus did not use discrete time. As the source transmits each horizontal line of the image, it varies its output voltage to represent the desired brightness. In a CRT device, this is used to vary the intensity of the scanning beam as it moves across the screen. However, in digital displays, there is an array of discrete pixels and a single brightness value must be chosen for each. The decoder does this by sampling the voltage of the input signal at regular intervals. When the source is also a digital device (such as a computer), this can lead to distortion if the samples are not taken at the centre of each pixel, and there are also problems with crosstalk.

DVI takes a different approach.The desired brightness of the pixels is transmitted as a list of binary code I/O. When the display is driven at its native resolution, all it has to do is read each number and apply that brightness to the appropriate pixel. In this way, each pixel in the output buffer of the source device corresponds directly to one pixel in the display device, whereas with an analog signal the appearance of each pixel may be affected by its adjacent pixels as well as by electrical noise and other forms of analog distortion.

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