Frau Klein

Still struggeling getting my Samsung SyncMaster P2370 working via DVI on a MacBook Pro. I just came across this article, a guy named Justin Ball had the same issue like I have: an external monitor doesn’t get recognized when connected via DVI. The DVI cable shipped with my monitor is a single DVI cable. Today I got a dual link DVI cable … and guess what it still doesn’t work :(

Right now I tried a Dell XPS 1730 running on Vista connected via DVI, my old MacBook being connected via Mini DVI to DVI and my MacBook Pro – both DVI cables single link DVI and dual link DVI didn’t work. I’ve spent now about 60 Euros on extras and still don’t have a working system. It’s so disappointing. All try-outs had in common that the screen kept being black. Although the MacBook at least recognized that there was a screen attached it didn’t bother to show anything.

Google doesn’t help at all this time, i found a few resources but none of them helped. So I don’t know if it is related to the monitor or to the cables, especially as the DVI to VGA cable is working… These following posts contain similar problems:

• http://www.123macmini.com/forums/viewtopic.php?p=164445 – no help at all.
• http://www.macsimumnews.com/macosgforums/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=15511&p=82576 – quite an old thread mentioning that DVI doesn’t work on Mac. Interesting though the link to HDCP.
• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2132837&start=0&tstart=0 – but it seems to be related to snow leopard, my mac is still running on leopard.
• http://www.tomshardware.com/de/foren/240472-18-samsung-syncmaster-p2370-edid-problem-geforce-8800 sounds interesting, but flashing the monitor and rewriting the EDID? I wonder if there is any other solution…
• http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2054326&tstart=1 recommends to reset everything, but unfortunately it didn’t work for me.
• Hm, http://craiccomputing.blogspot.com/2009/02/dvi-connector-problem-with-2008-mac.html confronts me with DVI-I and DVI-D-standards – from the sounds of it the Samsung does DVI-I and the DisplayPort supports DVI-D – if I understood it correctly it will never work then? Damn, I am confused now! The monitor does DVI-I, the DisplayPort Adapter only supports DVI-D. After living ages with *one* VGA standard why the hell are there at least five DVI standards? I wonder if I should now invest another 30 Euros to get a DVI-I to DVI-D adapter. But wait a second… the monitor came with a DVI-D cable. 

Now I am being totally confused and wonder why all our hardware (some MacBooks, a Lenovo, a Dell and another PC running Vista, XP and Mac OS Tiger and Leopard) refused to work with the monitor. WTF?

Current status: I gave up and reconnected the VGA cable again :(

Popularity: 4% [?]