Hacker News Reader

Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

> yes, connectors got much better in the past decades

Really? How is e.g. the HDMI connectors "better" than the VGA connectors? VGA connectors seems far more robust to me. Same with d-sub mouse connectors.

I guess the signal rating is better now but the old ones didn't need high frequency capabilities.

View on HN

VGA connectors were incredibly irritating to deal with, especially since so many of them were equipped with smooth screwing bolts with very little area to spin them with your fingers. I for one don't miss this.

If you wanted to have quick insert connection you could just not tighten the screws. I almost never tightened the screws, but it was good on monitors which were pivoting.

I am writing this on a screen where the HDMI connector pops out if a even touch it.

Just tighten one of them, its what i do half the time

And other half of the time you tighten another?

Yes :P. I’m a coward and never put it in without tightening at least one or both

I drilled two holes in my laptop as it had no room for VGA cable screws :D (about 2y ago)

> I am writing this on a screen where the HDMI connector pops out if a even touch it.

Just one more reason to switch to DisplayPort. The only downside of DisplayPort over VGA is that it's up to the connector model if it locks, not user input; but other than that DisplayPort seems clearly superior over VGA. Apart from the obvious signal improvements, slightly more compact design and the recessed port, even an non-locking cable sits far more securely than an unsecured VGA cable.

If I had to choose between a disconnection and damaged circuitry… I managed to pull too strongly on a DisplayPort cable plugged into monitor, resulting in broken PCB. Luckily, the HDMI wasn't affected.

Honestly, I have never tightened those screws.

Some of them actually had an end slot that could be tightened / untightened by a regular screwdriver It took me ages to realise this.

In the 1980s and presumably before, plugs like this often only had screws you needed a screwdriver to tighten.

I don't know if this was to prevent people disconnecting things, or if the expectation was that once connected, things should stay that way for years.

It helped me a lot when I had a colleague who had a strong workman's hands and who could not be found at the end of presentations where he had set up the projector's cabling.

You never had one of the pins slightly bending so the connector wouldn't fit anymore and you had to manually try to bend it back?

Sure. But if I remember correctly the cable ends are both male, so it was never the device that got bent. In some sense weakness on the right part is a feature.

every meeting room had a long semi-permanent cable wired through the walls / floors. bent pins on those were not fun.

Once you’ve been involved in repairing them, you start to insist on the sane approach - cable in the wall, connected to a faceplate which has a plug on the back and a plug on the front. That way any damage can be repaired without re running the cable.

VGA DVI and HDMI all have their major issues, DisplayPort is the clear winner in all aspects.

I bent a few pins in a VGA connector due to misalignment once. This was when the cable was hardwired into the monitor!

Ye maybe I am just nostalgic. Hard to tell.

You may only have dealt with your own devices. Yes, VGA devices were much harder to accidentally unplug or become loose than HDMI. But they were often far more solidly connected than e.g. the mount on a video card, or the attachment of a laptop motherboard to it's case. So you would find components which had been messed up internally by the use of a VGA connector as a leverage point.

Yep, harder to accidentally unplug is a large negative for a generic cable. There very few applications where it's a good thing, and connecting a computer to a display isn't one of them. IMO, DP in particular shouldn't have the locking mechanism.

But becoming loose without unpluging isn't good either.

I have never bend the pins on HDMI connectors. It doesn't even occur to me that it could even happen. I have bent dozens of vga connectors. At least you can bend them back.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com