Where can I get 6-10" high-refresh displays/touchscreens?

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fury
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Where can I get 6-10" high-refresh displays/touchscreens?

Post by fury » 25 Feb 2019, 13:22

I'm aiming to make an embedded system and I want to have a high refresh rate. Basically a tablet sized display (I'd like to aim for 7" 16:9 but would be ok with anything at this point, just for a PoC). There's 15-17" laptops with 120-144hz (though it isn't clear if they actually have touchscreens on those versions), and there's the 5.5" Razer phone with 120hz, but I have no idea where to get those panels, or where I'd get something in between. It's impossible to google for! I keep getting results for TVs or for the end-products like the Razer Phone and the iPad Pro.

Anyone know where I might be able to source a high-refresh touchscreen anywhere from 6" to 10"?

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Re: Where can I get 6-10" high-refresh displays/touchscreens

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 25 Feb 2019, 20:01

Are you making a one-unit run, or are you a manufacturer?

At this size category, it becomes potentially economical to DIY instead, if you are a manufacturer.

The TCON Modification Method (best for a manufacturer)
Basically sourcing a display and then modifying its TCON for a 120Hz refresh rate. You could talk to a party such as Zisworks for something like this. The Zisworks 4K 120Hz monitor that was commandeered to do 480Hz, is simply a common inexpensive off-the-shelf 28" 4K 60Hz panel that had its TCON replaced with an FPGA. Surplus of the original panels often go by on sites like Alibaba/Aliexpress for under 100, yet with the TCON modifications was modified to refresh practically 4x-8x beyond spec! That kind of engineering is very time consuming and expensive, but not impossible to pull off. See his one-man making of story at http://www.zisworks.com/making_of_x28x39.html

You could retain Zisworks for some services (if he's available), or even partially Blur Busters services (for overdrive tuning -- [email protected]) though your redesign/reprogramming of the TCON would be your own work as that is work I don't currently specialize at this time, but I do provide overdrive tuning & strobe tuning service.

Manufacturer-level "overclocking" of a small panel to 120Hz will typically create nasty ghosting problems, which will need some retuned overdrive algorithms to mostly fix. Get the fastest native pixel response you can afford.

The 120Hz Remote-Desktop-On-A-Razer-Phone-or-iPad Method
If this is a one-off thing. An unorthodox idea (if easier) is compile and sideload your favorite Remote Screen Viewer .apk application onto a Razer smarthone. Or create your iPad app for a 120Hz iPad. Treat the smartphone or tablet as a mini 120Hz monitor! A workaround is to use a Razer smartphone as a multimonitor display, using your own custom 120Hz-compatible Remote Desktop app. There is enough video codec horsepower for live realtime 120fps Remote Desktop or screen mirroring. But this may require less engineering to do to create your needed app, possibly as a modification of an existing open source screen mirror app (basically creating your own "120Hz miracast" for incoming to the phone screen). You may or may not need to modify the refresh rate of an open source remote desktop mirroring application to run at 120fps instead of 60fps. You can run networking into its USB port and turn off WiFi/LTE, permanently disable Android updates, and treat Razer smartphone as an offline embedded screen.
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fury
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Re: Where can I get 6-10" high-refresh displays/touchscreens

Post by fury » 26 Feb 2019, 07:37

I work for a manufacturer (automotive supplier) and we're just getting started with displays. So, maybe I'm jumping in the deep end before I learn to swim. I just know from my experience in using high refresh rate displays, it makes a big difference in how responsive and smooth the system feels

If a TCON can do 60hz at 1920x1080, would it be able to do 120hz at, say, 800x480-960x540 without modification, or is that not how those things work?

I did explore the idea of using the iPad Pro as an external display - what ended up working best there is a native UI running on the iPad sending control messages back to the target; anything else had too much latency and defeated the purpose of the 120 Hz (at least for me). I probably can't fit an iPad into this anyway. The prototype might end up in a double DIN chassis so I can stick it in my car, so either 7" or smaller, or the display sits outside of the front panel

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Re: Where can I get 6-10" high-refresh displays/touchscreens

Post by Chief Blur Buster » 26 Feb 2019, 12:49

fury wrote:I work for a manufacturer (automotive supplier) and we're just getting started with displays. So, maybe I'm jumping in the deep end before I learn to swim. I just know from my experience in using high refresh rate displays, it makes a big difference in how responsive and smooth the system feels
It certainly does!

And even 120Hz is not the final frontier either, as seen in 1000Hz Journey -- if future Hz becomes cheap, it will get milked by future manufacturers. (Much like for formerly-expensive 4K becoming cheap today)
fury wrote:If a TCON can do 60hz at 1920x1080, would it be able to do 120hz at, say, 800x480-960x540 without modification, or is that not how those things work?
Not exactly, and answering that question often required paid training, engineering books, or even deeper research.

While lower rez can sometimes makes higher Hz easier, there are other complications (e.g. scaler electronics malfunctioning at higher refresh rates, eliminating your ability to do scaled resolutions like those) and since you have to replace all those chips anyway, might as well try to do full 120Hz at native. Be prepared to work with FPGA chips if you need high-Hz at high-rez, though I know the Razer phone manages to avoid that.

Since Blur Busters (not just a media site) is also now in the business of helping manufacturers boldly venture where they have not ventured... I may be able to network around a little bit for you (e.g. try to reach out to some of my industry contacts willing to do 120Hz small-screen displays). Email me at [email protected]
fury wrote:I did explore the idea of using the iPad Pro as an external display - what ended up working best there is a native UI running on the iPad sending control messages back to the target; anything else had too much latency and defeated the purpose of the 120 Hz (at least for me). I probably can't fit an iPad into this anyway. The prototype might end up in a double DIN chassis so I can stick it in my car, so either 7" or smaller, or the display sits outside of the front panel
If you're reluctant to learn the advanced engineering of TCONs (or wait for 120Hz to be a widespread generic standard), this is your chief "easy" engineering option: Use Razer as the display.

Yes, the display itself being the computer, is a possible workaround. Consider that the 120 Hz Razer are already fairly powerful, so you could potentially do that too, using the USB port (it can run as a USB host, I believe) as your communication method. Disable all radios, and even use your own slimmed-down Android build, and treat the Razer like a tiny 120Hz computer screen -- at least during the prototyping or experimentation stage.

Consider that the Razer Phone 2 has a more powerful chip than many iPads. It has a 2.8 gigahertz Snapdragon 845 processor which is an 8-core ARM processor with 4 high-performance core and 4 power-efficient cores. By all standards, that's quite a powerful microprocessor already, because Razer is a 3D video gaming smartphone that must crank its Android games at 120 frames per second at 2560x1440 -- which it manages to successfully pull off in certain games. That's damn impressive, considering all the pixels at all that frame rate. All that computing horsepower is all already built bona-fide in the Razer 2 phone -- so it could simply run what you need. Just get rid some of the Android bloat (thankfully, Razers are usually often fairly lightweight stock Android installs by default)

Even its GPU can be commandeered to do basic natural learning and artificial intelligence tasks, being it one of the most powerful moble GPUs on the market even running circles around 10-year-old desktop GPUs. All things considered, that phone has more computing power than the computer that generated the original Toy Story movie in 1995. The problem is it heats up a bit, and then it automatically thermally throttles after a while. It uses a vapor cooling mechanism to help out, but tacking-on some additional add-on cooling (a simple engineering problem for you, hopefully) on the phone's back will help keep it from thermal-throttling too much -- allowing more continuous computation.

Now, this is not necessarily practical for retail units, but would potentially be fine if the phone had enough computing power to be the built-in-computer for your needs. Unless you're needing to use one of those ultra-powerful self-driving-car processors.

But you could even communicate between the two computers using the USB port too, like a networked supercomputer, with two applications co-operating with each other.

You could even use 3D-geometry-over-wire too, simply using the phone as a texture cache & 3D renderer. I don't know how much bandwidth of data you need but if it fits in the USB budget, the Razer 2 is fast enough to display stuff at latencies of mere milliseconds. You might have a problem if you're trying to display multiple video windows at once, then you're going to need to become very creative with that.

Since selfdriving cars are a booming tech.... Let's say you're working for one of them, working on a better/faster LIDAR+RADAR merged display. You could just invent your own streaming protocol for whatever data (e.g. aggregated realtime lidar data) treating the Razer as as a realtime drawing device; just sending batches of geometry data to the "phoneputer" which then draws in realtime in low latency. Being it originally a game phone, it has had to gain one of the most powerful smartphone processors.

Unless... You'd like to study display engineering instead?
I can help with certain elements of the display chain -- depending on the direction your company goes in.
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