Most common monitor features you should know about

Every monitor will share some common characteristics. It would be really helpful for you if you know these common features before you make your purchase, installation, maintenance and to troubleshoot. This article will provide you with such information.

Adjustments

Every monitor has this feature where you are able to adjust the brightness, contrast and various other aspects of the display, straight off the monitor by means of some buttons. All monitors generally provide you with an onscreen display OSD menu. They all allow to make some adjustments for the colour, brightness and screen size etc. The colour adjustments allow you to tweak the red, green and blue level to suit your colour needs.

VESA mounts

Nearly every monitor offers you the standardized bracket option for mounting the monitor on the wall or special stand called VESA mount. VESA is a standard which provides you immense flexibility and takes care of the ergonomic benefits. You will have a four hold bracket option behind the monitor. With the VESA mount you can scale up an LCD panels. For the big TV-sets you will have much larger mounting bracket than a 24 inch computer monitor.

You will find the VESA mount have other official names. Like – Flat Display Mounting Interface (FDMI) or VESA mounting Interface standard (MIS).

Add-on features

Sometimes you will find that some monitors have extra features added to the them by manufacturer. For instance, a webcam, USB hubs, speakers, microphones etc. The USB hubs generally extends the USB port of your system. Typically, you will find USB type- A, B, C. You can also connect the monitor directly to the systems USB port. But for this you will need a stable cable like one of the printer cables.

Display adapters/Video card

Display adapter or a video card is one of the most crucial aspect of the motherboard. This is what makes the communication possible between your monitor and the motherboard. A video card handles all of the works that needs such as – Computational logic, processing information from the CPU and sending it back to the monitor. Display adapter is one of the complex device. The graphic processor does the heavy lifting of the processing data from the CPU and handles the information to output on the monitor. Just like any other processor, your graphic processor needs RAM as well. This processor also needs fast connectivity, the CPU and system RAM. You must check your monitor compatibility with the adapter.

In the early days of Windows PC you had to plug in a display adapter to the motherboard as an expansion card. Many of the modern motherboard comes in with a built-in display adapter. Lot of people, even techs, call it a video card. Let’s look at five characteristics of a video card before we call it a video card. They are Mother board slot, Graphic processor, video memory, integrated GPUs and connections etc.