HP LP2065 An Overview of Current Display Interfaces - Page 3

convergence on a single digital interface standard for all such products, which would likely pull commercial users in the same direction. • LCDs already account for the majority of the PC monitor market, and have a rapidly-growing share of the TV market. No other display technology is expected to displace the LCD from its top position over this time period. These trends and the current state of the market will have the following effects on the predicted future of display interfaces. • The long-lived VGA connector will continue on for the foreseeable future, but will continue to lose market share slowly to the newer alternatives. The VGA connector for now remains the interface of choice for entry-level products, and will almost certainly be the only connector used with CRT monitors. The VGA connector will eventually be driven out of the market due to content-protection issues, but not until some time in the 2010s. • The DVI connector will continue to be used over the next 2-3 years as one of the PC market's standard digital interfaces. But starting in early 2008 DVI will begin to lose market share to the newer, smaller, more capable, and ultimately less expensive DisplayPort standard. This trend will accelerate over the next few years. (Support for legacy products will be provided via adapters between dual-mode DisplayPort products and their older DVI counterparts.) • The HDMI connector has already displaced DVI, for the most part, 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 near future as a smaller DVI-compatible output for some notebook PCs. • The DisplayPort connector will start to show up in the PC market in early 2008, and its use will grow over the next several years. Initially, this growth will be at the expense of the DVI share of the PC market (that is, the DisplayPort interface will be provided alongside the VGA connector). 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 is expected around 2009 that will provide 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 more distant 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. 3