[venery1]

I know some people have made vga cables using shielded cat5 cable, but I wanted to see if you could improve on it. Could you just remove and separate wires from a standard cat5 cable. From there measure all the cables to make sure they are the same lenghts. Then braid the number of required cables together so they are tightly twisted. Wrap the wires with teflon tape and then wrap that in foil tape for shielding. Then spiral a bare copper wire around the foil tape for the ground. Then wrap that with teflon tape and then heat shrink the entire cable. Does anyone think that this would work any better?

[jason176]

Man that sounds like alot of work. When you say people have made vga cables out of cat5 do you mean they put the vga connector on the end of a piece of cat 5 cable and used it like that or are you talking about a converter that will send the signal through a piece of cat 5 to be converted back into a vga and then into the monitor. If it is the latter of the two, it wouldn't work. Differential amplifiers are used to obtain a distortion free signal.

[venery1]

they just put a hd15 connector on the ends of a cat5 cable and use it like that, but you have to connect the ground pin to the shielding to put the cable closer to 75 ohms

[Hyper Smiley]

I agree. Sounds like too much work. The cables aren't that expensive. Save yourself from the headache.

[Shrivel]

Hyper Smiley, on Jan 16 2005, 10:24 PM, said:

I agree. Sounds like too much work. The cables aren't that expensive. Save yourself from the headache.

I ATTEMPTED to do it once. After about 3 hours of cursing and resisting the tempation of stabbing my eye out with the soldering iron, I gave up and ordered a 25 foot VGA cable for less than 10 bucks and was done with it.

[slayer1660]

both ways will work, but like he said, pre-fab'd extension cables are so damn cheap now a days.
or you can call dell.

[Agent707]

Or go here where you can get a 50 footer for $13.

[araczynski]

be carefull with the VGA cables, especially if you plan on going SXGA and 25'+, as a good number of them will be insufficient in quality for that resolution and will give you some ghosting.

[DimaR]

Yeah I bought a 100 foot VGA cable on eBay for like $15. When I use it for the PJ you can't tell with movies, but while in Windows I get ghosting and its a bit blurry.

Also, when I hooked up the cable to my 17" LCD I can def. tell that the quality is degraded and blurry.

I'm in search of a good 10-15 footer right now, as I don't need it that long anymore.

So basically if its too long, too cheap its probably going to be crappy.