Problem connecting HP ZR2740w to laptop

[KStogie]

I recently purchased a HP ZR2740w monitor to use as a second monitor for my laptop (HP Pavilion dv7). I did not realize that I would not be able to hook the monitor up to my laptop as the monitor has only DisplayPort and DVI-D ports and my laptop only has VGA and HDMI (should have read the product info more carefully but I didn't think I would have a problem hooking a HP monitor to a HP laptop).

My question is, will any cables, such as an HDMI to DVI cable, or any other adapters, work to connect these two? I have not been able to find any info on this on the internet.

I tried a VGA to DVI adapter on a spare VGA cable I had lying around but that did not work (though I could be doing something wrong).

Thanks,
Kevin

[lasvegaswireman]

DVI-D and HDMI use a common set of digital signals and therefore you should be able to connect your HP ZR2740w to your HP Pavilion dv7 laptop using a HDMI-to-DVI cable. The VGA port and DVI-to-VGA adapter won't because the analog signals are on different pins than the DVI digital signals.

From Wikipedia;

Compatibility with DVI

An HDMI to DVI adapter

A DVI to HDMI adapter

HDMI is backward-compatible with single-link Digital Visual Interface digital video (DVI-D or DVI-I, but not DVI-A). No signal conversion is required when an adapter or asymmetric cable is used, so there is no loss of video quality.[5]

From a user's perspective, an HDMI display can be driven by a single-link DVI-D source, since HDMI and DVI-D define an overlapping minimum set of supported resolutions and framebuffer formats to ensure a basic level of interoperability. In the reverse case a DVI-D monitor would have the same level of basic interoperability unless there are content protection issues with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), not supported by DVI, or the HDMI color encoding is in component color space YCbCr which is not supported by DVI, instead of RGB. An HDMI source such as a Blu-ray player may demand HDCP-compliance of the display, and refuse to output HDCP-protected content to a non-compliant display.[117] A further complication is that there is a small amount of display equipment, such as some high-end home theater projectors, designed with HDMI inputs but not HDCP-compliant.

Features specific to HDMI, such as remote-control and audio transport, are not available in devices that use legacy DVI-D signalling. However, many devices output HDMI over a DVI connector (e.g., ATI 3000-series and NVIDIA GTX 200-series video cards),[5] and some multimedia displays may accept HDMI (including audio) over a DVI input. Exact capabilities beyond basic compatibility vary from product to product.

[KStogie]

Thanks for the quick reply. I will pick up one of those cables, give it a try, and report back.

-Kevin

[KStogie]

I picked up an HDMI to DVI-D cabel and it did work to connect the monitor to my laptop. Unfortunately it is only allowing me to use a max resolution of 1280x720. I am guessing this is limited do to the cable?

Thanks,
Kevin