Friday 19/8/2005

Much better, thank you. As will be our display devices of the future, says the Video Electronics Standards Association as it unveils DisplayPort, the next generation of connection to go between devices and displays. It's more a mini data transfer standard than a set of wires coupling red, green and blue: interactive at ten gigabits a second, it lets audio and high resolution video share the same cabling while reducing the number of wires required.

I'm not sure it has a chance. That old analogue dog VGA is holding on tremendously well, despite being introduced nearly twenty years ago: it was supposed to be gently shouldered aside by DVI which appeared in 1999, but look at the back of a video card and you'll see them happily coexisting. Monitors have got very good at reconstructing the ragged old analogue signal that comes out at their end of the cable, far better than anyone expected all those years ago -- so why do we need a better cable? And who has speakers in their monitors these days?

In any case, soon - please let it be soon - we'll have proper wireless alternatives with UWB, if you want to have a difference that makes a difference. There could be some visible improvement with HDTV if you use DisplayPort, but who knows when that'll be important?

I'll ask Intel when I see them next week, at the same time as I ask them how they're getting on with their display technologies. I still can't get over it dropping the liquid-crystal on silicon (LCOS) chips, which demonstrated the best potential for high quality display output I've ever seen. Perhaps displays, like so much of computing, are good enough now - in which case, DisplayPort will quietly fade away.

As, coughing and spluttering, must I. Until next week's West Coast special, adieu. And pass the hanky, there's a dear.