MiniDVI to multiple monitors on iMac

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

so you want to spread your desktop across 2 monitors? if so you cannot do that with a single display port to 2 external monitors. however, you are running an imac? do you want to have the imac be one of the monitors and put another one next to it?

as for vga vs dvi vs hdmi, the latter 2 will give you better picture, but unless you are a video or graphics professional, gamer or otherwise have very good eyes, you would likely be hard-pressed to notice the difference between vga and dvi/hdmi.

(although some here will likely disagree)

for all intents and purposes, the video quality of hdmi and dvi are essentially identical; hdmi just also carries audio in the same cable. so for a computer monitor, unless you have speakers coming out of the monitor and not the computer itself, dvi is fine. dvi is broken into 3 categories – dvi-i, dvi-a and dvi-d. google a bit to learn the difference as they are not interchangeable.

any modern system has dvi output and almost all monitors these days have dvi input, so you can go with dvi safely. i personally use vga still because i have a kvm switcher and it does not support dvi, so i’m stuck unless i upgrade that. but in most cases, dvi is the way to go…

hope that helps a bit – let us know on the desired imac setup and we can offer some additional advice…

sitruc

[Nick Jay]

Hey Curtis,

Thanks so much for the reply. Basically I’m trying to hook up an add’l monitor for my iMac (for video editing) plus another display for clients to watch. iMac + 2nd monitor + 3rd monitor (tv).

Ideally, I would set up the third monitor as an ‘external device’ in FCP or Avid, but I hear that costs several hundred dollars to configure. So I was thinking I could use the monitor as an additional computer monitor output and ‘full screen’ the video playback. Does that make sense?

Any advice or alternative methods would be greatly appreciated!

Nick

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

hmm – well since you are limited by a lack of ports, you can’t do this the traditional way, which is to just purchase another video card and then you can have dual output that way…

i have never used this product, but it sounds like it would get you that 2nd monitor via your usb port:

https://www.evga.com/uvplus/

which came from this article:

https://www.brighthub.com/computing/mac-platform/articles/58242.aspx

now i’m not sure at all how the mac os responds to this, so that might take some experimentation (i’ve only ever used dual monitors via graphic cards as opposed to usb). i only say this because it’s a video signal coming in via usb, but you should be able to research based on this product and find out how it would end up working for this specific instance…

sitruc