VGA Converter Boxes

This article is about a piece of equipment. For more information on what it is for or how to use it, try its documents wiki article.

Driven by the steadily worsening condition of the Cub Conversion monitors, and having failed to find an affordable source of working colour video monitors (most professional monitors being very expensive unless they were broke or nearly so, and cheap CCTV monitors being mostly black and white), more ideas were needed to achieve a monitor rack upgrade.

The prospects for "doing another cub job" seemed pretty poor, as VGA computer monitors need a higher scan rate (minimum 60Hz) and have different picture sizes. Inventing an adaptor circuit seemed pretty much impossible, and Google didn't have any answers either. Richard Ash was convinced he had seen such a device in use during his gap year, so the idea was rattled around quite a lot. With the massive switch to flat screens, 14" and 15" CRT monitors became available on the second hand market very widely, and essentially zero cost. Whilst the build quality of these was no better than of the Cubs, the supply showed no signs of drying up, so replacements could always be found, providing the conversion wasn't too firmly attached to the monitors. It now became viable to consider buying conversion units, which could be re-used with successive monitors in the future.

In 2005 a suitable device was finally located, and a unit bought as a test. This proved to be a great success, giving much better picture quality than many of the Cubs they replaced. A cheaper alternative was discovered, and it had advantages, including being smaller and having slightly more conveniently located ports. After finding no major difference in quality, 8 of the cheaper boxes were bought to enable the worse half of the Cubs on the monitor rack to be retired from October 2006, and the remainder the following year. Whilst not as good as a proper video monitors, and so not used for critical output monitoring, the commercial converters have stable and reliable brightness and colour, provided that the monitor itself works. Once a few of the worst VGA monitors had been disposed of and replacements blagged, this was not a problem.