VGA splitters - do passive ones always give poor picture quality?

[James]

After talking to a couple people about VGA splitters, I decided to try
a $4.99 one at Fry's. I asked an employee there who said they use this
$4.99 one all the time to split the signals for their demo monitors,
and they've had no problems. A couple other people I talked to told me
they have used cheap VGA splitters without bad picture quality, so I
bought one.

When only 1 of the 2 monitors is plugged into the VGA splitter,
everything looks fine, but when both monitors are plugged in the
picture becomes fuzzy and very dark. Other Usenet posts indicate this
is an impedance problem, so I'm puzzled why other people and the Fry's
employee told me these type of VGA splitters worked for them.

Would there be any point in trying the only other VGA splitter Fry's
has for $5.95, or do all passive VGA splitters (i.e. not distribution
amps) have this poor signal quality problem and those I talked to
either lied to me or somehow were too blind to notice the poor
resulting picture quality?

 

[netnut]

After talking to a couple people about VGA splitters, I decided to try
a $4.99 one at Fry's. I asked an employee there who said they use this
$4.99 one all the time to split the signals for their demo monitors,
and they've had no problems. A couple other people I talked to told me
they have used cheap VGA splitters without bad picture quality, so I
bought one.

When only 1 of the 2 monitors is plugged into the VGA splitter,
everything looks fine, but when both monitors are plugged in the
picture becomes fuzzy and very dark. Other Usenet posts indicate this
is an impedance problem, so I'm puzzled why other people and the Fry's
employee told me these type of VGA splitters worked for them.

Would there be any point in trying the only other VGA splitter Fry's
has for $5.95, or do all passive VGA splitters (i.e. not distribution
amps) have this poor signal quality problem and those I talked to
either lied to me or somehow were too blind to notice the poor
resulting picture quality?

I bought an active VGA splitter and oddly enough have a similar
problem, so I was going to try one of the passive splitters. This is
truly going in reverse.

I bought the Tripplite 2port VGA splitter. Connected one end to my
Media Center PC. One o/p port to a 19'' LCD monitor and the other to an
LCD projector. The monitor works fine on either port. The projector
does not lock on to the signal and shows nothing. Needless to say when
I connect the projector directly to the computer it works okay.
Frustrating because I started with the dual card option. Had one care
with a DVI and a VGA. Gave up on it as ATI's software is so poor that
making the card do clone mode was a pain in the rear. So I went to the
active splitter and now that has failed. Will try the passive splitter
and post here. I am not optimistic about that since there will be a
current drain and will be an impedance mismatch will cause issues at
these high frequencies.

Netnut
Los Altos, CA