If you are professional users, the safest thing is that you have the right hardware to work, which has cost you a lot of money. But, you have to connect the graphics card to the monitor and you have a difficult choice about the video interface to use. Which is the ideal one to work professionally in design and therefore correctly represents the color, the HDMI or the DisplayPort?
The representation of color on the screen is one of the most important issues in the professional world where an incorrect representation of it can lead to headaches when choosing the monitor and even in some cases the graphics card. But does the video interface influence that aspect?
The importance of color for design
In the world of graphic design in all its aspects, the correct representation of color is one of the most important elements. The reason is none other than that monitors tend to get out of calibration in terms of color, causing the representation of it to be affected.
This phenomenon is not something that affects the average user who gets used to different color representations of different brands and graphic cards, but it is important for the professional content creator who cannot afford mistakes when working with color. in his compositions. Whether for editorial design, video editing and the other branches of graphic design.
Due to this, both the manufacturers of monitors and graphics cards look to offer the correct representation of color as a plus aimed at their professional ranges.
Not all monitors represent the same color
If you have had two different screens, even of the same brand and reproducing the same content, you will have observed how the color representation is totally different from one monitor to another. But in order to show an image on the screen we have to take into account that three different elements participate:
- The graphics card that generates the image.
- The video interface that sends the image to the monitor.
- The monitor itself.
The video interface nowadays does not influence the quality of the color representation of the monitor and it is rather a matter of the graphics card and the quality of the monitor when we talk about the color representation and not the video interface used, It is especially the quality of the screen, which is, after all, what the images show us.
So it is important to look at the monitor and graphics card specifications, especially today when all monitors and graphics cards have both HDMI and DisplayPort interfaces.
HDMI versus DisplayPort
HDMI is a video input interface derived from DVI, which could be defined as DVI with integrated audio carrier and HDCP. Which was thought for high definition LCD televisions, as well as video players and consoles for such televisions. The DisplayPort, on the other hand, is a VESA standard, which was intended to be used in computers. Which is paradoxical since the DVI from which HDMI is derived was originally thought to be a successor to VGA, but in the end it has been DisplayPort that has become the standard for PC monitors.
Now, we talk about the differences between both types of interface. HDMI in its newest version, 2.1, can transmit up to 48 Gbps from VRAM to the monitor, but DisplayPort version 2.0 can go up to 80 Gbps, which allows you not to have to pull to trim the color definition in high resolutions. Although at the moment no monitor or graphics card with DisplayPort 2.0 support has appeared.
This has a very simple explanation, internally the GPU when composing the image does not take into account the difference between HDMI and DisplayPort, being the video controller the one in charge of sending the signal to the HDMI controller or DisplayPort. The problem? Many graphics cards transmit for a single type of video output and through a signal converter they send the image to the other type of interface where it ends up looking exactly the same.
HDMI and DisplayPort represent the same color
Actually today no video interface is better than another for reasons that we have already mentioned. We don’t want to sound repetitive, but in general the video signal is treated the same regardless of the video interface used, be it HDMI or DisplayPort. This is because in order to save hardware costs, common parts are used for HDMI and DisplayPort internally.
Our advice is that you use the interface that allows you to work better, and it must be said that the advantage of DisplayPort to handle multiple monitors with a single interface is what gives it points of advantage, especially when we work at very high resolutions in which HDMI 2.1 has a disadvantage, but this is from a theoretical point of view, since we do not have displays or GPUs with DisplayPort 2.0 support.
And for color calibration, make use of an HDMI or DisplayPort interface, we recommend using a hardware color calibrator if you have to work professionally.
