Nick
The average home user / gamer always wants the latest and greatest. In this case DVI is the new technology so everyone assumes it must be better. However the industry looks beyond a single market when they design products. I’ll use my new f1200 product as an example. I specifically did not include DVI for a number of reasons.
Technical – DVI Chips these days are slow. They are fine for LCD’s running up to 1280 x 1024. Soon the 1600 x 1200 displays will flood the market and the current generation of DVI chips will not be capable of the speeds required. Thus you will be required to upgrade both your video card and monitor.
Market – This depends on the companies focus. Cornerstone sells primarily to fortune 500 corporations who purchase 20 – 500 units at a time. The IT managers at these companies have strict budgets and they do not upgrade as often as a home user. They must amortize the cost over 3-5 years depending on how their company does accounting. For example some of my customers are still using OS2 and Windows 3.1 or Window 95. These companies require backward compatibility, thus they only require an analog interface. If I added DVI the majority of my customers would not use it and it would simply add cost to the product.
Performance – The studies I have done show very little improvement in video quality between the DVI and analog interface. The magazine reviewers like CNET and Myelabs tend to agree.
Primary reason is the panel itself is an analog device. At the driver level the control of the cell must step through at least 256 levels, this cannot be done with a in pure digital fashion. Even the DVI interface converts the signal from digital parallel to a serial bit stream across the video cable.
Also until very recently the DVI standard was in a state of flux. Multiple companies, revisions / versions, some capable some not. I tend to be conservative and like to let the technology stabilize before incorporating it. Think of all those people who purchased Beta-Max video recorders. Arguably Beta-Max was a better technology, however VHS became the standard. Pick the wrong one and we go out of business. The Analog interface is safe and proven technology and is supported by virtually every video card in the world today .
Jim Witkowski
Chief Hardware Engineer
Cornerstone / Monitorsdirect.com
Jim at
http://www.monitorsdirect.com