VGA Cables: For the Bigger Picture
If you are a trainer, or a manager used to conducting a lot of office meetings, you know how difficult holding the attention span of an audience can be. That lesson that you may have spent the entire night working on is going to be in vain with students dozing after the first few minutes of your lecture. Those important updates that you want to give your colleagues can be lost as they doze off in the course of your meeting. One of the best ways to prevent this from happening and hold the attention of your listeners is to accompany what you say with visuals. All it takes is a VGA cable to bring about this change and make your class or meeting more productive.
A Video Graphics Array cable is one of the oldest connection standards found in computing equipment. Laptops, computer monitors, TV sets and videos cards are some of the devices in which we normally use these cables. Introduced in 1987, these cables were first developed by IBM, before they soon began to be built by other manufacturers with increased features. This was mainly developed at a time when analog signals were a norm. However, once digital signals came into the picture, these cables soon began to get enhanced with converters, thus enabling an analog to digital conversion.
What is a VGA Cable? What are its Uses?
This is a cable that you use to get your computer connected to another monitor, thus transferring pictures that can now be displayed on the other monitor. Designed with a screw on either side of the plug, these cables can easily be mounted to a matching plug at the back of a computer system.
How to Identify a VGA Cable?
In order to identify this cable, you need to look at the inside of the plug. If it is a VGA cable, it will mostly have fourteen pins on the inside along with a hole showing. However, there are cables with pins missing on the inside of the plug. This can vary depending on the setup of the system.
Resolutions That VGA Cables Can Support
These cables can support resolutions that go up to 640 x 480 in 16 colors. However, the number of colors can be increased by lowering the resolutions to 320 x 200. Also known as mode 13h, this is very useful in booting your computer into safety mode. This was a very common mode for computer gaming back in the 1980s and 1990s.
Signals That the VGA Cable can Carry
These cables can carry red, green, blue as well as horizontal sync and vertical sync signals. A VGA socket usually has 15 pins. These pins are arranged in three rows of five pins, which are usually colored blue. Two screws attach this cable socket to the device. These are found on each side of the socket.
Though replaced by digital DVI and HDMI connections, VGA cables can still be used in a lot of computers today. Brands like Apple, Axcess, Microware, RoQ and Jinali have VGA cables with different features that you can compare online before you choose the one you find best to use with your system.