VGA to Component cable won't work

[Mccaula718]

My roomate went out and bought a vga to component cable to hook his laptop up to his 42inch panasonic plasma. Going to display properties and enabling it as the second monitor does nothing. The plasma stays black and receives no signal. I have tried this on my laptop as well as his, with no results. Anyone have any ideas?

This is the same type of cable that he bought.
http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10235&cs_id=1023503&p_id=2170&seq=1&format=2

 

[SJetski71]

Two different types of analog signal. There are currently few components i know of that can accept that sort of adapter cable. i'll assume a panasonic plasma isn't one of them but don't quote me on that. What surprises me is that so many merchants carry that dam cable, and that so few of us can actually use it...

What you probably need to make it work is a vga to component transcoder, and even then i'm not sure how well it would work with a panny plasma.

 

[CrimandEvil]

Did you or your roommate actually read anything on these cables? It says:

THIS CABLE WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO CONNECT YOUR COMPUTER'S VGA PORT TO THE COMPONENET INPUT ON YOUR HDTV unless your video card supports component out function through it's VGA port (please confirm with your video cards documentation before purchasing)

Which means your video card's VGA port needs to be hardwaired to output a component signal; I'd say that it's possible that older ATI cards like the 900 series could potentially work with it. Anyways, it's not going to work with anything that isn't made for it.

The cable is made for TVs, DVD players and projectors who have one of these special VGA ports (theres one on my TV, seems very common on them).