Connecting your screen to an PC

To use a LCD/TFT/Plasma with a PC you will need to know a couple of things.

Connection

The first thing you will need to know is how you will connect your screen to your PC. There are 3 main ways of connecting your screen, they are:

• DVI/HDMI (Best quality) - Adaptors can change DVI into HDMI
• VGA (Quality depends on manufacturer) - sometimes called 'PC Input'
• S-Video (Standard definition)

"The back of typical graphics card"
DVI/HDMI is the best connection because there is no conversion required in your PC and screen. VGA is the second best, but varies between models. This is because there is a conversion required (analogue to digital) in the TFT/LCD/Plasma and PC. The PC's digital to analogue converters will be very good, whist the quality of the TFT/LCD/Plasma analogue to digital converters will depend on how much money was spent on them by the manufacturer. The last resort is a S-Video connection.

Resolution

Now you will need to find out what resolution your screen has. If you're using an S-Video connection, you can skip this whole section.

You should find the resolution of your screen under the specification section of your manual. You will be looking for something like "Resolution: 1366 x 768" or "Resolution: 1920 x 1080"/Full HD: 1080p.


What does this mean? It simply means how many 'dots' (called pixels) build up the picture across and down. In the above case it tells you there are 1366 pixels across and 768 pixels down. If you multiple the two numbers, you will find out there is 1,049,088 pixels. You could call this screen a 1 Mega Pixel screen (with some rounding) - something you may of heard with many digital cameras.

Most LCD TV's have a resolution of 1366x768 or 1920x1080 (1080p). If your LCD has a resolution of 1366x768, then the nearest your PC can do is 1360x768 (this will leave 6 pixels 'empty'). It depends on your TV what happens to the 6 extra pixels. If you have a TV with 1920x1080 (1080p), then you can simply select 1920x1080 on your PC and everything should work fine.

Plugging things in

Once you have worked out what connection you will use and the resolution of your screen, you can think about plugging it in.

With any PC which is being used by another screen, you should change the resolution on the PC to a low one (something like 800x600). This will allow the new screen to work whist you set it up correctly.

If you're using an S-Video connection then you will need another monitor to setup the TV output in your graphic card driver.

Setting up the PC

Once you have got the screen plugged in and working with the PC, you will need to setup the PC. You will need to set the required resolution, refresh rate (always set 60Hz) and color depth (always use 32 bit). This is how it looks on my screen: