DVI verses S-Video Cable

[RTSDaddy2]

My wife and I are confused.

[SOAPboy]

If you hook a TV up to VGA and or DVI, and the TV supports it, its going to be clear no matter what card your using..

theres also a HDTV kit for PC.. its 150ish bucks, but its hella nice.. its made by ATI.. ^_^

[xar256]

If your looking for clear sharp text <planning on word processing, browsing, etc>, DVI is defiantly the way to go.  If all you're planning on doing is playing pc games/mame/emulators.  It would probably be a wasted investment imho. 
The video card should do just fine provided you use the vga-dvi cable.  Or you could get a new video card that has DVI out.  <I have an MSI FX5200 128MB card that I got about 8 months back for like $80 CDN.  It has VGA, S-video, and DVI outs.  You can do whatever you like then provided you have the cable.
There has been a fair bit of talk about this kind of thing at Rampy's BYOPVR site http://www.byopvr.com/  Search in the forums there, they go into much more specific info there.

Xar256

[Dexter]

DVI is the way to go. I run 2 PCs into one 20" LCD, one via DVI one via a VGA cable, constantly switching between them. Because I'm running at 1600x1200 the ghosting and interference over the analog cable is really bad. DVI is MUCH better, the difference depends on how good/bad your s-video analog signal is to start wth.

[RTSDaddy2]

Hey, thanks guys!

You told me what I pretty much suspected, despite what the second salesman told me...that DVI is the better of the two.  Our S-video picture is pretty strong, but we need something a little clearer for those times that we have to browse, do WP, or update programs from the net.

Thanks for your help!

RTSDaddy2

[ChadTower]

It's very simple:

S Video - analog
DVI - digital

Anything analog is lossy in transport by nature.  Digital is not.

[RTSDaddy2]

That makes sense - I'm not really sure what I thought S-video was actually.  Man, I'm  learning more than I ever expected to learn as a result of building this thing!!

RTSDaddy2