Is there are any way to connect MBA with thunderbold to DVI monitor?

Well, that interesting (NOT). I do not want to argue about whether the DVI age has pass or not. However, you'll have to do some real searching to find a DVI monitor today. I did take a quick look at the Panasonic and didn't see one set that said anything about DVI.

Giving you the benefit of doubt on this issue, I think you will find that almost all if not all NEW DVD/Blu-Ray only have HDMI outputs with a few also having a component option.

Any current Directv receiver/Comcast cable receivers also follow this convention. The first ATV only offers HDMI/component output. The newer ATV2 only has HDMI. The list goes on and on. HDMI didn't exist when DVI popped up on the horizion. My first LCD (Sharp) about 7 years ago had a DVI output.

I think you stated that your MBA DVI dongle did work on one of the Apple Store moniters that did have a DVI input which would leave one to believe your DVI port on your LCD is toast. Any chance you might be using teh wrong DVI cable? The site below shows several different DVI cables with diffenent pin combinations.

http://www.datapro.net/techinfo/dvi_info.html

If you google DVI verses HDMI, you will see most responses say there is no difference in the video which I would agree on, having used DVI on my old Sharp.

Good luck with your DVI problem...

What you list -- DirectTV and Comcast receivers, BluRay DVD players, etc. -- are all home audiovisual equipment. However, I'm not talking about television or audiovisual equipment for the "home". I'm talking specifically about monitors for computers. They're LCD monitors.

I didn't know Panasonic offered monitors, so I took a look. Here is their entire LCD monitor offerings for the North American market, as far as I can tell:

http://catalog2.panasonic.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ModelList?storeId=11201& catalogId=13051&catGroupId=14926

All of their LCD monitors have DVI and HDMI ports except for the 8" LCD monitor which only offers S-Video and VGA. I think you're misinformed that DVI has been replaced by HDMI in the computer market.

Certainly, HDMI is more popular in the home electronics equipment. That I knew. HDMI carries audio signals too. What I didn't know is that HDMI has supplanted DVI in the computer electronics equipment market. But given what I see now, I actually don't think HDMI has supplanted DVI in the computer market. The DVI port is still widely available on LCD monitors, including the Panasonic monitors you were citing. Again, we're not talking about the "home electronics" genre, which computers don't fall under.

Another thing: either I wasn't clear in my post, or you misread:

There is nothing wrong with the DVI port on my LCD. It's not toast. It worked on the original MBA that I own. When that DVI LCD monitor was plugged into the computers at the Apple Store, it also worked. Like the tech support person at Apple store said, all the ports on my LCD monitor and the new MacBook Air work. Her hunch is that the thunderbolt port is not supplying a strong enough DVI signal to my monitor, so my monitor is not able to detect it.

And no, my monitor does not use a Dual-Link DVI port. Its highest resolution is 1680 x 1050.

The solution I'm now using is the VGA port on the LCD monitor. That LCD monitor comes with both VGA and DVI port. This solution works for this setup.

thauxley wrote:

What you list -- DirectTV and Comcast receivers, BluRay DVD players, etc. -- are all home audiovisual equipment. However, I'm not talking about television or audiovisual equipment for the "home". I'm talking specifically about monitors for computers. They're LCD monitors.

Sorry, I didn't realize you were looking for bigger screen to use as a computer monitor. I thought you want to show movies, etc on a big flat screen. I'm going to stand by my statement that DVI is a dying technology for video transfer from a player to a flat screen MAINLY because there is no way to route the sound along with the video except via a 3.5mm sound cable. And that's way all the modern devices such as DirectTV and Comcast receivers, BluRay DVD players, etc only offer either HDMI or component outputs.

My wife has a 6 year old LCD monitor that only uses DVI. I'm going to try to hook up to it with my MBA and check the results. I'll post the finding here later.

Unable to do the test because I don't have the latest DVI dongle.

Yes, you'll need a Thunderbolt to DVI adapter.

thauxley wrote:

Yes, you'll need a Thunderbolt to DVI adapter.

Your right about what I would need to do a "test" with my wife's DVI monitor. I thought I had that adaptor, but the one I was using on her setup was the following adaptor which is the only one that works with her 2 year old Mac Mini.

http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3413

And does NOT fit the Thunderbolt port on the new Apple products.

I suspect the reason the LCD monitors you're looking at support DVI since there are still a lot of computer video cards that feature DVI outputs. If a computer wants to sell their LCD displays to the broadest part of the market, they have to support a DVI input.

Not to revive this old thread but stumbled upon it when looking for answers on a different matter with thunderbolt to dvi connection. But i just want to set some things out straight that's a bunch of overly common mistakes made by pseudo-technicians...

HDMI is -not- replacement technology for DVI, nor is DisplayPort.
Different ports are used for different connection purposes (call it situations if you will) and they have technical differences, even though all three (in the case of DP, potentially ) use the same protocol for transmitting video data (Being the DVI specs which are maintained ⚠), with the exception of a DisplayPort for that it only uses proprietary protocols when both ends use displayport.

Anyhow, the consumer is also confused because they mainly see HDMI inputs appearing on TV's, DisplayPort which had mainly been pushed by Apple, HP and Dell and then there's the omniplatform DVI.

Differences in means of appliance;
-DVI (introduced 1999) was simply the Digital Visual Interface, an interface designed for transmitting digital video signals.
-DisplayPort was introduced in 2006, mainly to remove the need of paying for royalties and licenses and apart from the clock signal from dvi being embedded in the rest of the signal, there's no big difference (however this technical difference causes DisplayPort to require active convertors for using HDMI or DVI cables).

- Then there's HDMI which mainly incorporates the use of a DVI signal along with the potential to also send digitally encoded audio (up to 8 independent channels) and ethernet and some other details like 3d interlacing (is this the left or right image?) in later specs.

The biggest differences between the three technologies are their actual purpose.
DVI is in-my-opinion still THE standard for digital image display, why? It has the biggest bandwidth.

Something not many consumers may notice, but unlike HDMI and DisplayPort, DVI has the capability to use "Dual Link" Capabilities, effectively doubling the data rate of a single DVI-channel (which normally would be 3.96gbit/s, effectively becoming 7,92gbit/s transfer rate.

HDMI is still limited by a rate of 8.16 gbit/s while still having to send the audio and possibly network along.

DisplayPort was looking to be promising, promising a bandwidth of up to 10,8gbit a second for both audio and video combined it should be technically possible to send as much image data as over dual-link DVI. However where i've seen DisplayPort applied to monitors with target (native) resolutions over 1080p 60hz (in either resolution or frequency) it has thus far been plagued by many incompatibility issues. Also the fact that it needs an active adapter to convert from displayport to any other standard makes it a no-no for any situation where you can't use displayport-displayport as a connection (mostly because of compatibility issues caused by attempting a different connection).

Also the notion of solving issues with cables instead of the brain is bad behaviour.

In the situation where youre using a monitor you simply need to transfer video signals, DVI should suffice. leveraging overall the best compatibility and low amount of cost for licenses.

HD-tv up to 1440p or 3d resolutions where audio is also transfered (like when using a dvd player or semi-portable like a notebook to display along with sound on tv) that's what hdmi is intended for, not putting you open to the downside of having an insufficient bandwidth for higher resolutions (which we'll start to run into soon enough now 1440p displays and 4k displays are slowly showing up on the market).

The consumer is also getting more wrongly confused as i've seen 4k tv's enter the market with HDMI 1.4a spec, which i really do not appreciate, knowing that the 4k 60hz screen will not be done justice by it's 4k 24hz source which is the current maximum rate at which we can transfer 4k images over HDMI (1.4a) Using DVI-dual-link we'd be theoretically able to supply the full 3840*2160 @60Hz, 32bpp

DisplayPort may be partially seen as a replacement for HDMI in my honest opinion, mainly because it will deliver a higher bandwidth where HDMI will lack this, however the requirement for active adapters and the current compatibility issues that still excist in different applications make me hesitant to advice it for use for an 'average' consumer.

Hope to have provided some fruitfull input for the future visitors, so someone wont just blindly walk in and then first make the wrong assumption that DVI is a dead-and-wasted interface, followed by that HDMI is its superior successor and that DisplayPort is the way to go... because it turns out... its certainly isnt always.

Before anyone will challenge what i said about displayport; if it's different situation then a connection directly from DP to DP and then it's a possibly an applicable argument. if that rule cannot be applied, you're simply being mislead by the opacity of the technics behind it. This also rules out examples like airbook to imac connections, since in that even't you would probably connect both through native DP which is just as much of an impressive result as that vga works thanks to the analog pins also still used in DVI (which isn't an impressive result 😉 it's part of the spec. whereas we were intended to easily adapt dvi and hdmi displays to displayport but its still problematic)

Now... back to looking why the heck my epicly-standard DVI monitor is not recognized by the thunderbolt adapter *sigh* Thanks for reading 🙂