What do you use - HDMI, VGA or other, for projectors?

[localzuk]

We like to have everything in the school the same in each room. The individual devices may be different makes, but the experience ends up being the same. Go into any room and you have the same leads to plug in.

 

So, as yet, we have not made the switch away from VGA. Meaning we're not making the best use of our fancy WXGA projectors capable of 1080p in many rooms.

 

Doing a look at our estate, we have 5 projectors left, out of 30 in this school, that don't have HDMI support. We also have 15+ laptops with no HDMI port, but 5 of these have already been scheduled to be replaced.

 

So, with those numbers, it'd be at least another 2 years until we could make the switch.

 

Have any of you made the switch?

[sted]

only by dint of going from smartboards and projectors to "tvs" in which case vga is still wired in usually just in case but its hdmi (or dvi-hdmi) wherever it possibly can be

[6Foot2]

Still 100% VGA here although there was talk, during the holiday, of trying one room with one user on HDMI but that was quickly dropped as we could not guarantee that the same user would always be using that one room. Other teachers coming into that room could easily be thrown by a different set up.

 

We dropped the idea.

[sted]

also be aware hdmi is really picky about longer cables and can be a total pita as some devices are better at driving a display over a long cable some just wont at all or you get sparkles or other corruption

[FN-GM]

HMDI only on all sites. Only a small handful of rooms that have both VGA and HDMI on the wall faceplate (VGA not used) all the others have HDMI only.

[Blue_Cookeh]

HDMI nowadays, we found that sticking by VGA was limiting our choice of laptops so we ditched it when we swapped all our projectors for CleverTouch screens, particularly with our new Lenovo X260 devices.

[3s-gtech]

We only have a few projectors now without HDMI, but not that many of our wall plates have it and those are the expensive bit to change. Most of our teacher PCs also have either DisplayPort or twin VGA via DMS-59, so would need to change graphics cards to suit. VGA works fine for 1080p though, just more common to see distortion of the signal or poor colour reproduction due to shaky connections.

[Sagima]

Due to the head's dislike of cables stretching over the floor, up walls and things we have started using network projectors. It only gets rid of 1 cable but it pleases him. (technically the cable is replaced from a thick 5-10m vga cable to a 50cm or less ethernet cable)

The cabled ones are completely reliable, the wireless ones are not so we have given up on those for the moment. We use a variety of Epson projectors. Everything else is vga with the exception of the interactive tvs which are hdmi

 

edit: connecting over wifi to a cabled projector is fine - the reverse (cable to a wifi projector)is not true

connecting wifi to wifi seems fine as well

Edited September 6, 2016 by Sagima

[gbiltd]

Ideal to have both VGA & HDMI when having any new equipment installed.

Re the HDMI cabling issues - inexpensive boosters have solved all our speckle/flickering issues on short or long cable lengths

[hardtailstar]

We use VGA and wireless on our projectors.