The Cheap Monitor Extension Cable Is Gone...
Ever since we moved, I suffered with a blurry monitor.
It's not the monitor's fault - it's a really nice Dell Ultrascan P991 19" flat screen monitor.
The problem was that my desk is about twelve feet away from the KVM switch I use to allow me to use one Keyboard, Video, and Mouse with the four PCs in my office. Well, actually, the distance wasn't even the problem. Truth be told, the problem was that I was cheap when I ordered the twelve foot (actually two six foot) monitor extension cables.
I did some research, and the consensus was that with anything over a 17" monitor, the display was going to be fraught with ghosting, blur, and other visual distortions without the use of high quality monitor extension cables. So, I decided to spend some of my Christmas money and get me some decent cables.
The primary extension cable I ordered was a Cables To Go part number CTG #28003 15FT extension from Provantage. This is about the mother of all monitor extension cables; it is double Ferrited and Double Shielded, constructed with UL2919 certified composite coaxial and twisted pair shielded cables. I couldn't find a twelve footer, thus the three excess feet. I also bought a 6FT CTG #14095 extension cable to replace the medium quality cable between my work notebook and the KVM. Unfortunately, Provantage was out of stock of the ferrited 6FT cables, so I had to settle for the unferrited version, although I think because it is so much shorter, it is not as big an issue. Just the addition of the new "main" cable provided a significant improvement on the work notebook, and the new extension cable for the notebook port provided even more improvement. I then took the medium quality cable from the notebook and used it to replace the really cheap Tripp-Lite cable going to one of the "servers." That improvement was the most dramatic of all. I went from a system display which was barely readable because of the multiple ghost images, to a system display which is only mildly ghosted (probably as much due to the cheap video driver on the system as to the quality of the extension cable).
Even on my "main" PC, the image is still not 100% perfect - there's still a hint of ghosting - but considering I've got a KVM with six feet of cable on one "side" and fifteen feet of extension cable plus six feet of the monitor's cable on the other, it's pretty amazing just how good the display is. I did also notice just a hint of flicker after installing the new cables that I hadn't seen before, but upping the refresh rate to 100 Hz appears to have fixed that issue (and the ability to support 100 Hz refresh rate is pretty amazing in its own right given my setup).
So, I guess, at least in this case, the old adage is true - you really do get what you pay for.
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Posted by David at December 19, 2005 04:25 PM