Digital Visual Interface (DVI) is a video interface standard. DVI supplies high visual quality to digital display devices. It’s inception is interesting in that it was developed by an industry consortium (the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG)). It’s arrival replaced the VGA connector standard.

It communicates a significant jump from analogue to digital and transmits uncompressed digital video data to digital display devices. It is partly compatible with the High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) standard, and VGA in analogue mode.

The DVI interface communicates the representation of pixels as binary data. At the time of reading, the digital display device will read the data and apply the different necessary brightness to each pixel. It’s superior to the analogue method in that each pixel is read and represented precisely, whereas via analogue the representation of each pixel can sometimes be affected by neighbouring pixels and electrical noise.