According to Wikipedia, DVI is a video display interface developed by the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG). The digital interface is used to connect a video source to a display device, such as a computer monitor. It was developed with the intention of creating an industry standard for the transfer of digital video content.
The interface is designed to transmit uncompressed digital video and can be configured to support multiple modes such as DVI-D (digital only), DVI-A (analog only), or DVI-I (digital and analog). Featuring support for analog connections, the DVI specification is compatible with the VGA interface.[1] This compatibility, along with other advantages, led to its widespread acceptance over competing digital display standards Plug and Display (P&D) and Digital Flat Panel (DFP).[2] Although DVI is predominantly associated with computers, it is sometimes utilized in other consumer electronics such as television sets, video game consoles and dvd players.
DVI connectors come in several different configurations, which look as follows:
From this it can be seen, that DVI is actually quite confusing, since the same connector (DVI integrated) can be used for both analog and digital output.
So, if one wants to convert from DVI to another format such as HDMI, composite, component or VGA
one needs to establish from the above, which type of DVI your equipment uses and also ensure from the equipment whether the output is digital or analog, if an integrated DVI connector is used.
From that it is easy to see, that conversion from digital DVI to HDMI would be easy and inexpensive,
since both use digital transmission, but a conversion from analog DVI to HDMI would be relative expensive,
since not only would the converter have to change the signals from analog to digital, but also up-scale to the higher resolution of HDMI.
