Touch screens - do i need DVI?

[shenandoah75]

Looks like ELO discontinued most of their DVI input touchscreens and they were 17" or bigger...

I was shooting for maybe a 12/15" one flush/rear mount. They make them but they are all vga. I'm used to the quality dvi provides on my PCs and can tell the difference when i swap in most cases. If i go this route, will i be disappointed given it's just a kiosk? Do i need to worry long term about vga's obsoletion?

thx
-brad


Fyi, this would be one touchscreen located centrally in my living area serving mainly for music selection, but maybe integrating with elk / lighting / etc too)... It will be the primary/only monitor i hook up to my rackmounted server which would do the music distribution of audio (via a m-aduio delta 410, etc) and any HA integration i decide on.

 

[mdesmarais]

I would expect it to be OK- in fact, VGA will go longer distances more easily. If the auto setup on your monitor isn't good, you may need to manually tune it, but otherwise you shouldn't have any worries.

I'm a little surprised that you could tell the difference- were you running very high res? I used to design LCD monitors for a living, and if the interface is set up correctly, it should be very hard to tell. Lots of variation on auto setups though! Cheap A/D front ends can be bad, but they are a lot less common now. Poorly matched video cards can cause some grief too (shadowing, etc)

If you want to torture test the monitor, try an image that is a vertical grill of 1 pix on, 1 pix off. That should show up most timing defects. Grayscale ramps will show clamping white/black level issues.

 

[shenandoah75]

thx!

ya i run 1280x1024 on all my displays... the one that was really noticable was a nvidia geforce2 card with vga / dvi. I could swicth the input on the viewsonic 17" display and it was very noticable (lines/text were not crisp at all). Might have just been that setup and definately would not run that high a resolution on the touchscreen.

 

[Sacedog]

thx!

ya i run 1280x1024 on all my displays... the one that was really noticable was a nvidia geforce2 card with vga / dvi. I could swicth the input on the viewsonic 17" display and it was very noticable (lines/text were not crisp at all). Might have just been that setup and definately would not run that high a resolution on the touchscreen.

Interesting. I am running a 24" widescreen at 1920x1200 resolution, on a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTS w/ 640MB of video memory, and I cannot tell the difference between the DVI and the VGA connections when using high quality cables.

I am a pretty serious gamer, and am passionate about the quality of graphics. Maybe it is the cables that is making the difference on your setup.

 

[mdesmarais]

SXGA (1280x1024) is not really high res these days. Short cables are also unlikely to be much of a problem. My guess is that the monitor was either not running an auto calibrate, or was not doing a good job of it. It is pretty easy to mess up the digitization!

 

[shenandoah75]

I won't deny it... There are other setups where it's been hard to tell - namely another viewsonic VP171B i'm using with same resolution.

Thx - looking to purchase an elo or something