Hello,

The Zero 88 lighting desk I use at school has an output to connect up a monitor - Will a standard PC monitor work with this?

Thank you,

Sean

You didn't mention the model name, but a quick browse of the Zero 88 website shows they have lighting desks with a "VGA monitor port."

This is an older, deprecated connector type. It wouldn't be unusual to find an old computer monitor with a VGA connector, but most new ones will have HDMI or DisplayPort connectors. Slightly older ones will use DVI. There are adapters for everything.

Deprecated but still produced and fairly common. The computer monitors I'm using right now are only a few years old and have VGA D-Sub inputs alongside DVI, which is still the dominant standard for computer video. My TV downstairs is only a year old and also has both VGA and DVI inputs.

As far as adapters, yes they exist for everything, but it's easier if you have a monitor that supports VGA, or failing that DVI-A or DVI-I, which are transitional standards intended to bridge the gap and avoid making every monitor obsolete all at once. These DVI connectors will have four pins (or pin sockets) surrounding the "blade" on the connector's pinset. If you have a monitor with this pin arrangement, there is a VGA to DVI converter that costs about $6 and simply rearranges the VGA pinout to the DVI arrangement. If there are no pins around the blade, the monitor is designed for digital input only, and the adapter you'll need is more an A/D converter, and will cost up to $30 to go from VGA to either DVI-D or HDMI.

Between DVI-D and HDMI, which is better depends on the HDMI spec the monitor supports. DVI-D supports marginally better resolutions and framerates than HDMI 1.x, but beginning with HDMI 2.0 the data rate for HDMI surpassed anything DVI could do. This is of little concern to the OP, as the VGA link spec is limited to a little better than 1080p quality, well within any other standard's capabilities, and video quality's going to depend more on the quality of the converter and scaler than the actual plug into the monitor.