Connect Your Laptop To Your TV With VGA

What You Need To Know To Connect Your VGA Laptop to Your TV

A VGA Port Can Be Found on Laptops And TVs

With the advent of streaming on demand video services like YouTube, BBCi Player and Sky Player there is an ever increasing need to connect our laptops to our TVs. Let's face it, a laptop screen hardly provides comfortable viewing and the sound quality usually isn't much better, but there is a solution. VGA. Over the past few years HDTV manufacturers have been including VGA inputs on many of their TV sets which are often labelled as 'Computer Input' or 'HD15 connector' and this allows us to connect our laptops with VGA ports directly to our TV using a VGA Cable.

What is a VGA port?

A VGA port is a small connector which has 15 visible holes over three rows (5 on each row). It's an extremely common connector type and has been used for years to connect PCs to monitors. If you have this port on both your laptop and your TV then you can connect them with a VGA Cable.

How Do I Make The Connection?

The connection is simple. You simply run the VGA Cable from your laptop to your TV. The laptop should recognise the connection and adjust the resolution automatically to suit the resolution on your TV. You will then need to select the channel on your TV which handles the VGA input (see your TV instruction manual to find out how to do this).

How Do I Connect Sound?

As great as VGA is it is a video only format so does not transmit sound, which is why we are beginning to see the emergence of new technologies such as Mini HDMI and DisplayPort. However, the overwhelming majority of laptops have VGA ports on them so we have to handle the sound separately. There are few different cables which can be used for sound depending on the device you are connecting to:

3.5mm Stereo To 3.5mm Stereo Cable

Nearly all laptops have a 3.5mm Stereo output on them, which is usually used to plug your headphones in to and this is what we use to output the sound. If your amplifier or stereo system has a 3.5mm Stereo input then you can use a 3.5mm Stereo Plug to Plug cable to connect the sound to your system.

3.5mm Stereo To RCA Cable

Once again we are using the 3.5mm Stereo output (or headphone socket) to output the sound. If your amplifier or stereo system has an RCA input (Red and White connectors) then you can use a 3.5mm Stereo Plug to Twin Phono (RCA) Cable to connect the sound to your system.

3.5mm Mini Jack to Toslink - Digital Audio

Many laptops 3.5mm Stereo port also output a digital signal. The port will often be labelled with an 'spdif' (or this will be in the manual) and this means you can connect your audio digitally. If your stereo system has toslink inputs on them (A small, almost square connector) then you can use a 3.5mm Mini Jack to TosLink Cable to connect your sound.

What VGA Cable Do I Need?

While VGA has developed over the years to support higher resolutions, most VGA cables manufactured these days are robust enough to support any resolution. In most cases our High Quality VGA Male to Male Cables are perfectly suitable for connecting your laptop to your TV. However, some graphics cards do require all 15 pins to be connected (pin 9 is often missed out as it isn't usually used). If you know this to be the case then you may prefer to go for one of our Professional Gold VGA Male to Male Cables which have all 15 pins.

Tags: VGA , Laptop to TV

Category: Technical Help

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