An Overview of Current Display Interfaces

 The HDMI connector has completely displaced DVI in consumer HDTV gear.

HDMI will continue to grow in popularity in the consumer market for both HD

and digital SDTV equipment and start to displace the older analog-only TV

interfaces (such as S-Video). HDMI, however, is very unlikely to see much use

as a PC monitor connection or graphics output, except for TV connectivity

purposes and in the short term as a smaller DVI-compatible output for some

notebook PCs.

 The DisplayPort connector started to show up in the PC market in early 2008,

and its use has grown rapidly over the past few years. This growth has been at

the expense of the DVI share of the PC market (that is, the DisplayPort interface

is typically provided alongside the VGA connector). But eventually, DisplayPort

will also displace VGA and become the dominant PC-market interface.

DisplayPort brings advantages in performance, size, and eventually (as volumes

mature) cost over the older DVI standard, and has much better extensibility for

the future. (As noted in the DisplayPort section later in this document, a second-

generation DisplayPort spec was published in 2010, and provides a significant

capacity increase as well as adding additional features, while maintaining full

backward compatibility with the original version.) DisplayPort is also the only

one of these interfaces that is intended for use as a panel-level (internal)

interface, permitting direct-drive monitor products that may be attractive in

some markets.

 In the future, it is at least possible that DisplayPort could also be adopted for

CE-market products, and become the converged, common digital interface used

by both CE and PC displays although HDMI currently shows no signs of decline

in its CE-market dominance.

The following sections provide brief overviews of each of these standard interfaces.