Small monitor options for R-Pi

Found another...

Audiovox

http://www.bing.com/shopping/audiovox-fpe709-7-lcd-tv/specs

I was thinking of going battery powered, with one of these:

http://www.lilliputuk.com/monitors/hdmi/668gl/

I was thinking along the lines of either a back up camera screen (they actually have decent resolution if you buy the right one) or one of those screens that clips on to a video game console for car trips and stuff.

Dont let the $20 pricetag fool you, shipping to my zip code was almost another $20.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Zenith-Flat-Panel-LCD-Display-Game-Screen-for-Xbox-PS2-Brand-New-Sealed-/190644769348?pt=Video_Games_Accessories&hash=item2c63505244#ht_500wt_1156

That would take a little modification but should be easy enough to hook up to the Rpi. But this one is much easier

http://www.ebay.com/itm/7-Color-TFT-LCD-Car-Rearview-DVD-VCR-Backup-Camera-Display-Monitor-w-IR-Remote-/300657147646?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item46008ffefe#ht_3476wt_1265

I'm not sure exactly what functions your CarPC will support- how much resolution do you need?  If you need to read a lot of text, that's different from just video, audio playlists or a few icons and readouts.

A cheaper option may be a portable DVD player - I think some of these come with an AV input.

That was my first idea, and you could gut the dvd player part to put the raspberry pi in there as well. But the one I have does not have av in. I am still thinking about buying one that does. It would be pretty cool  form factor wise. But I can not find a good deal on one that I know had av inputs.

Be aware that the monitor must have either HDMI, or composite video input (Yellow RCA input, directly or through a SCART adapter).

So no "RGB", "component video" or S-Video (mini DIN-4). These are all unsupported, as is VGA.

Interestingly the RasPI does support raw LCD panels, through its 15-pins MIPI Display Serial Interface (DSI) connector, although at the moment there doesn't seem to be any software support for it, and the pinning of the 15-pins connector is also unknown.

The RasPI supports a range of digital low resolution settings such as 640x350 (EGA); 640x480 (VGA) and 800x600 (SVGA)

on its composite output it can handle both PAL 576i interlaced 720x576 50 Hz as NTSC 480i interlaced 720x480 60Hz, as well as some variations on PAL and NTSC, for example Japanese NTSC. Other low resolutions seem to be possible with some "tweaking", currently the tweaking to get composite video resolutions has not seem to be finished yet, but the hardware can do at least the above.

I've been interested too in finding a small, portable & inexpensive display for the Pi.  I finally ordered a composite LCD from Amazon: http://www.element14.com/community/groups/raspberry-pi/blog/2012/07/04/cheap-portable-lcd-for-raspberry-pi.  The resolution is too low for normal use but I think it will be helpful as a screen embedded in a project to display larger text and graphics.

If you want to go smaller than that AdaFruit has some options:

http://www.adafruit.com/products/913

http://www.adafruit.com/products/912

http://www.adafruit.com/products/911

I tested the Rpi with a 7" TFT LCD TV/Monitor, I didn't find the way to tweak the NTSC signal, I'd agree that the TV/Monitor is not a great thing, but the text from the Rpi is practically unreadable.

A Picture is worth a thousand words ...

Is two, two thousand ? Next picture is from a 21" HD Monitor via the composite video input

I've to admit that I'm not using a high quality video cable, and there is some noise on the signal, there is flickering on the colors and text looks like if the pixel clock had a lot of jitter.

OK, lets make it three thousand then ... after startx

Not bad, but with the noise moving the pixels and flickering on the colors, you may be able to survive in text mode but for graphic mode I think the best way is to go with the HDMI interface.

Signal quality will probably be better with a better cable (I'm using a standard 3xRCA AV cable).

-J

Although I haven't yet received my RPi (it's supposed to arrive this week), I already bought a 7" lcd monitor on ebay that comes with hdmi and support of HD resolutions (native resolution is 840x480 I think). I think the direct signal from HDMI to a screen is much more preferred over a simple analog SD signal like the one you get from the RCA on the Pi.

Here's how it looks from a regular boot screen, it has very decent contrast: