WTV – What The VGA!

Digital Signage Blog

9 years ago

Yesterday I was in a large retail store that appears to have just rolled out a Digital Signage solution and me being a busy bee I was intrigued to see their setup. When I looked at the back of the screen my first reaction was “What the….VGA!” I was shocked to see a High End LED Commercial Screen installed but was connected to a digital signage player using a VGA cable. Yes! A VGA cable. What year are we in again? As I mentioned the screen was LED, definitely not a CRT screen so why use VGA? I’m not sure what the installers or company that rolled out this solution was thinking but I hope that the retail chain reviews this so that they can have a better image quality.

When I looked at the player and the screen they both had a HDMI and DVI port so there was no excuse to use one of those digital ports. For those non-techies out there here’s a few reasons why you SHOULD NOT use a VGA cable.

It’s old technology!

VGA stands for Video Graphics Array and it looks like this:

It’s been used since the beginning of the Computer revolution and it basically connects your computer to a display screen – this was the standard back in the day.

It’s Analogue!

There are many limitations with using VGA such as frame rate, image quality because it’s analogue. The new standard is to use HDMI or even Display port as these are digital. With VGA you will notice some blurring at high resolutions.

No Audio!

The VGA cable does not support audio so if you wanted to connect the digital signage player to the screen, then you will need to run a separate audio cable. With HDMI or Display Ports you don’t need a separate cable

Bent Pins!

Over the years this has happened to me as well. If you insert the end of the cable at the wrong way or at an angle, then may be bending the pins. This can cause distortion on the screen, ghosting, or you may end up with just a black screen.

Just because the screen comes with a VGA cable it doesn’t mean you need to use it!

I know of several commercial screen manufacturers that still ship VGA cables as part of their packaging but my recommendation is that they should stop this. Either put a HDMI cable or don’t put any Video Cables at all. We’ve been collecting these VGA and they are useless to us, plus it’s wasting space. Here’s a picture of the ones we’ve collected so far:

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