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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I too felt the author’s snobbery towards lesser connectors. I felt the same way towards equipment that did not have SDI as well. As cool as HDMI is, the connector is just not a secure attachment. It is today’s equivalent of the yellow/red/white video/audio jacks of older equipment. It is too easy for it to be pulled out accidentally. The twist lock secured connection of BNC is just reassuring.

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Just about any connector can be converted into a locking and secure connector, such as the following CAT6 locking connector that is used significantly in live broadcast applications:

http://img.directindustry.com/images_di/photo-g/15214-238173...

As for HDMI, it has incredibly few uses into terms of professional production (outside of connecting monitors) setups, but still can be made secure, as seen here: http://www.hallresearch.com/img/products/C-HDMI-L_connected....

Interesting. For live audio work I've usually encountered Ethercon (basically XLR with a CAT6 connector in the middle):

https://www.neutrik.com/en/neutrik/products/ethercon-rj45-co...

I saw one of these for the first time just last week. Patching a laptop into a DMX light controller.

Ethercon really is a fantastic connector. I had a client who were working on industrial systems that lived in harsh environments, and recommended it to them. They ignored me on their first model, and used the connector quite successfully on rev 2 after they had a ridiculous number of field failures using normal Ethernet jacks.

My wife does AV production work and loves them too. Plus, in a pinch, you can just use a regular old Walmart Ethernet cable. Really handy to have a fallback (unlike e.g. XLR, where you're trying to find a pro audio shop)

SCART is another disgusting connector that European readers will be familiar with. I like the idea of combining multiple video formats with sound as a predecessor to HDMI, but the least they could have done was put a decent D-sub or the Amphenol-style ribbon connector.

I recently got pretty heavily into SCART connectors because of retro video game stuff (the most common rgb connector you can use with older consoles is scart) and after a few months I've thrown it all away in exchange for special component cables instead because scart is just terribad in terms of staying connected.

Can't count the number of times I've had colour production go wonky just because of a tiny bump of the scart cable.

Connected a SCART TV and STB when I first moved to France. The cable was stiff, heavy, and unwieldy and it neve quite fit once everything was pushed back into the cabinet.

I was in college in the mid-90's, and scrimped and saved at one point to buy myself a 17" monitor [1]. (A big deal at a time when 14" and 15" were typical.)

I remember being pretty impressed that that the cable connected to the monitor with five BNC connectors rather than the usual VGA port or termination inside the monitor case. (Of course I doubt it did me any good at all b/c I just connected it to an ordinary VGA port on the other end.)

1] A Sony GDM-17SE1 if anybody remembers those. (Couldn't quite swing the slightly nicer Nanao FlexScan that could do native 1600x1200.... but the Sony was an excellent display anyway.)

Boy do I remember these. Analog component inputs. Essentially RGB+Hsync+Vsync. Or more correctly, YPbPr,H,V if I got the abbreviations correct.

I used to crimp/solder BNCs to cables, and I was so happy when we could switch to SDI instead of analog video cables. Each cable for the analog component video cables had to be the same length (within a very small tolerance) or the signals would be out of sync causing the color to not be reproduced correctly. Some devices had timing that you could adjust to compensate, but cable length was important. If you screwed up one of the cables and needed to cut off a bit to redo the end, you had to do the same "correction" to all of the other cables to match.

Oh how I miss the Trinitron. I too had one early on, a 19" model circa 1999/2000ish. It was stellar--mine had the 5 BNC and VGA input, of course I used the VGA too :D

> I too had one early on, a 19"

I bought my 17 in around 94-95 and used it for at least five or six years. It started out attached to a 486/33 and wound up attached to a P5/100 and then a custom K6/233 I bought when I got my first job, had for about a month, and then sold to buy a Thinkpad 560. (The same job that paid for the fancy desktop also kept me away from it, so I never really used it.)

It was probably around the same time you had yours, but I briefly did buy another desktop machine with a Dell branded 19" Trinitron. It was also very nice, but weighed a ton. (It was also the last CRT I bought.... everything since has been various LCDs, and aside from some crappy TN laptop displays, it's generally been a big improvement.)

Edit: I should add about these Trinitron displays... there are people that complained about the stabilization wires on Trinitron CRT's. I was able to see them, but they weren't an issue and the rest of the display quality was so good it didn't matter anyway. (At least to me.)

DisplayPort has an (optional) locking connector

I can kind of understand why it is options. We have them in our conference rooms and I have seen too many locking display port cables just ripped out of laptops. Makes me cringe every time.

It's still rather fragile and a pain to terminate, which disqualifies it as a serious connector in my book.

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