Display types

Just a few elements

Lighting

Nixie tubes

Mechanical

Mechanical counter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_counter

Split-flap

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-flap_display

Flip-disc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip-disc_display

LED segments

7-segment and others

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

7-segment, 9-segment display, 14-segment, and 16-segment display. If meant for numbers will be a dot next to each (also common in general), if meant for time there will be a colon in one position.

These are really just separate lights that happen to be arranged in a useful shape.

Very typically LEDs (with a common cathode or anode), though similar ideas are sometimes implemented in other display types - notably the electromechanical one, and also sometimes VFD.

Even the simplest, 7-segment LED involves a bunch of connectors so are

• often driven multiplexed, so only one of them is on at a time.
• often done via a controller that handles that multiplexing for you

Seven segments are the minimal and classical case, good enough to display numbers and so e.g. times, but not really for characters.

More-than-7-segment displays are preferred for that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-segment_display

DIY

LCD character dislays

Character displays are basically those with predefined (and occasionally rewritable) fonts.

Classical interface

The more barebones interface is often a 16 pin line with a pinout like

• Ground

• Vcc

• Contrast

usually there's a (trim)pot from Vcc, or a resistor if it's fixed

• RS: Register Select (character or instruction)

in instruction mode, it receives commands like 'clear display', 'move cursor',

in character mode,

• RW: Read/Write

tied to ground is write, which is usually the only thing you do

• ENable / clk (for writing)

• 8 data lines, but you can do most things over 4 of them

• backlight Vcc
• Backlight gnd

The minimal, write-only setup is:

• tie RW to ground
• connect RS, EN, D7, D6, D5, and D4 to digital outs

(near-)monochrome

SSD1306

OLED, 128x64@4 colorsTemplate:Vierfy

https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/SSD1306.pdf

SH1107

OLED,

https://datasheetspdf.com/pdf-file/1481276/SINOWEALTH/SH1107/1

Small LCD/TFTs / OLEDs

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Small as in order of an inch or two (because the controllers are designed for a limited resolution?(verify)).

💤 Note that, like with monitors, marketers really don't mind if you confuse LED-backlit LCD with OLED,

and some of the ebays and aliexpresses sellers of the world will happily 'accidentally' call any small screen OLED if it means they sell more.

This is further made more confusing by the fact that there are

• few-color OLEDs (2 to 8 colors or so, great for high contrast but only high cotnrast),
• high color OLEDs (65K),

...so you sometimes need to dig into the tech specs to see the difference between high color LCD and high color OLED.

When all pixels are off they give zero light pollution (unlike most LCDs) which might be nice in the dark. These seem to appear in smaller sizes than small LCDs, so are great as compact indicators.

Can it do video or not?

If it does speak e.g. MIPI it's basically just a monitor, probably capable of decent-speed updates, but also the things you can connect to will (on the scale of microcontroller to mini-PC) be moderately powerful, e.g. a raspberry.

But the list below don't connect PC video cables.

Still, they have their own controller, and can hold their pixel state one way or the other, but connect something more command-like - so you can update a moderate amount of pixels with via an interface that is much less speedy or complex.

You might get reasonable results over SPI / I2C for a lot of e.g. basic interfaces and guages. By the time you try to display video you have to think about your design more.

For a large part because amount of pixels to update times the rate of frames per second has to fit through the communication (...also the display's capabilities). There is a semi-standard parallel interface that might make video-speed things feasible. This interface is faster than the SPI/I2C option, though not always that much, depending on hardware details.

Even if the specs of the screen can do it in theory, you also have to have the video ready to send. If you're running it from an RP2040 or ESP32, don't expect to libav/ffmpeg.

Say, something like the TinyTV runs a 216x135 65Kcolor display from a from a RP2040.

Also note that such hardware won't be doing decoding and rescaling arbitrary video files. They will use specifically pre-converted video.

In your choices, also consider libraries. Things like TFT_eSPI has a compatibility list you will care about.

Interfaces

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

ST7735

LCD, 132x162@16bits RGB

ST7789

LCD, 240x320@16bits RGB

https://www.waveshare.com/w/upload/a/ae/ST7789_Datasheet.pdf

SSD1331

OLED, 96x 64, 16bits RGB

https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/SSD1331_1.2.pdf

SSD1309

OLED, 128 x 64, single color?

https://www.hpinfotech.ro/SSD1309.pdf

SSD1351

OLED, 65K color

https://newhavendisplay.com/content/app_notes/SSD1351.pdf

HX8352C

LCD https://www.ramtex.dk/display-controller-driver/rgb/hx8352.htm

ILI9163

LCD, 162x132@16-bit RGB

http://www.hpinfotech.ro/ILI9163.pdf

ILI9341

https://cdn-shop.adafruit.com/datasheets/ILI9341.pdf

ILI9486

LCD, 480x320@16-bit RGB

https://www.hpinfotech.ro/ILI9486.pdf

ILI9488

LCD

https://www.hpinfotech.ro/ILI9488.pdf

PCF8833

LCD, 132×132 16-bit RGB

https://www.olimex.com/Products/Modules/LCD/MOD-LCD6610/resources/PCF8833.pdf

SEPS225

LCD

https://vfdclock.jimdofree.com/app/download/7279155568/SEPS225.pdf

RM68140

LCD

https://www.melt.com.ru/docs/RM68140_datasheet_V0.3_20120605.pdf

GC9A01

LCD, 65K colors, SPI

Seem to often be used on round displays(verify)

https://www.buydisplay.com/download/ic/GC9A01A.pdf

Epaper

SSD1619

https://cursedhardware.github.io/epd-driver-ic/SSD1619A.pdf

Many-element - TV and monitor notes (and a little film)

Backlit flat-panel displays

CCFL or LED backlight

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCFL

Self-lit

OLED

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

OLED are organic LEDs, which in itself party just a practical production detail, and really just LEDs. (...though you can get fancy in the production process, e.g. pricy see-through displays are often OLED with substate trickery(verify))

While OLED is also a thing in lighting, OLED usually comes up in the context of OLED displays.

OLED displays are mainly contrasted with backlit displays. OLEDs being off just emit no light at all (compared to pixels that block backlight, because it is hard to get those to block all light) So the blacks are blacker, you could go brighter at the same time, There are some other technical details why they tend to look a little crisper.

Viewing angles are also better, roughly because the light source is closer to the surface.

PMOLED versus AMOLED makes no difference to the light emission, just to the way we access them (Passive Matrix, Active Matrix).

AMOLED can can somewhat lower power, higher speed, and more options along that scale(verify), all of which makes them interesting for mobile uses. It also scales better to larger monitors.

POLED (and confusingly, pOLED is a trademark) uses a polymer instead of the glass, so is less likely to break but has other potential issues

VFD

• 

  larger segments

• 

  dot matrix VFD

Vacuum Fluorescent Displays are vacuum tubes applied in a specific way - see Lightbulb_notes#VFDs for more details.

Some theory - on reproduction

Reproduction that flashes

Film

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Mechanical film projectors flash individual film frames while that film is being held entirely still, before advancing that film to the next (while no light is coming out) and repeating.

(see e.g. this and note that it moves so quickly that you see that the film is taken it happens so quickly that you don't even see it move. Separately, if you slow playback you can also see that it flashes twice before it advances the film - we'll get to why)

This requires a shutter, i.e. not letting through any light a moderate part of the time (specifically while it's advancing the film). We are counting on our eyes to sort of ignore that.

One significant design concept very relevant to this type of reproduction is the flicker fusion threshold, the "frequency at which intermittent light stimulus appears to be steady light" to our eyes because separately from actual image it's showing, it appearing smooth is, you know, nice.

Research shows that this varies somewhat with conditions, but in most conditions practical around showing people images, that's somewhere between 50Hz and 90Hz.

Since people are sensitive to flicker to varying degrees, and this can lead to eyestain and headaches, we aim towards the high end of that range whenever that is not hard to do.

In fact, we did so even with film. While film is 24fps and was initially shown at 24Hz flashes, movie projectors soon introduced two-blade and then three-blade shutters, showing each image two or three times before advancing, meaning that while they still only show 24 distinct images per second, they flash it twice or three times for a regular 48Hz or 72Hz flicker. No more detail, but a bunch less eyestrain.

As to what is actually being show, an arguably even more basic constraint is the rate of new images that we accept as fluid movement.

Anything under 10fps looks jerky and stilted

or at least like a choice.

western and eastern animations were rarely higher than 12, or 8 or 6 for the simpler/cheaper ones

around 20fps we start readily accepting it as continuous movement,

above 30 or 40fps it looks smooth,

and above that it keeps on looking a little better yet, with quickly diminishing returns

So why 24?

Film's 24 was not universal at the time, and has no strong significance then or now. It's just that when a standard was needed, the number 24 was a chosen balance between various aspects, like the fact that that's enough for fluid movement and relatively few scenes need higher, and the fact that film stock is expensive, and a standard for projection (adaptable or even multiple projectors would be too expensive for most cinemas).

The reason we still use 24fps today is more faceted, and doesn't really have a one-sentence answer.

But part of it is that making movies go faster is not always well received.

It seems that we associated 24fps to feels like movies, 50/60fps feels like shaky-cam home movies made by dad's camcorder (when those were still a thing) or sports broadcasts (which we did even though it reduced detail) with their tense, immediate, real-world associations. So higher, while technically better, was also associated with a specific aesthetic. It mat works well for action movies, yet less for others.

There is an argument that 24fps's sluggishness puts us more at ease, reminds us that it isn't real, seems associated with storytelling, a dreamlike state, memory recall.

Even if we can't put our finger on why, such senses persist.

CRT screens

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

CRT monitors do something vaguely similar to movie projectors, in that they light up an image so-many times a second.

Where with film you light up the entire thing at once (maybe with some time with the shutter coming in and out, ignore that for now). a CRT light up one spot at a time - there is a beam constantly being dragged line by line across the screen -- look at slow motion footage like this.

Except what they light up is different. A film projector is just bouncing light off something white.

A CRT is pushing energy into phosphorescence - lighting up a pixel's worth of phosphor at a time. That phosphor has a softish onset, and retain light for a little while.

...but still mostly fallen off a millisecond or two later(verify), so they're definitely pulsing.

The largest reason that these pulsing phosphors don't look like harsh blinking is that our persistence of vision, combined with the fact that it's relatively bright, end up looking fairly constant. (you could say our eyes framerate sucks, though actually this is a poor name for our eyes's actual mechanics).

While TVs were fixed to 50Hz or 60Hz, primarily because they had to deal with one specific broadcast standard, most CRT monitors can be told to refresh at different rates.

There's a classic 60Hz mode that was easy to support, but people often preferred 72Hz or 75Hz or 85Hz or higher modes, primarily because they reduced eyestrain.

And yes, after working behind one of those faster-rate monitors and moving to a 60Hz monitor would be really noticeable. Because even when we accept it as smooth enough, we still perceive it as blinking.

To recap, in TVs and CRT monitors, we light up a line at a time (the line nature is not the only way to use a CRT, just the easiest way to fill the entire screen. For alternatives, see e.g. vector monitors, and CRT oscilloscopes), in fact a pixel at a time. Which happens so fast -- necessarily so -- that you would need a very fast camera to notice this. Take a loook at [1].

This means that there needs to be something that controls the left-to-right and top-to-bottom steering[2] - and because you're really just bending a stream it back and forth, there are times at which that would be a visible line (mostly horizontal-ish between lines, one diagonal between frames).

We solve that by just not emitting electrons just then, and call that the blanking intervals.

That's a lot of intricately timed things, and this is done within the set. In computers, there is a hsync and vsync pulses, which if I understand correctly are not so much control signals as... suggestions, interpreted by the monitor as "does that look like a timing of a mode I know? Okay, then I'll do the rest".(verify)

CRTs were driven relatively directly from the graphics card, in the sense that the values of the pixel we're beaming onto a pixel will be the value that is on the line at that very moment.

Later monitors were not tied to that mechanism, but there was still not that much reason to deviate.

You could add buffers, but why? It would cost more, be more complex, and probably a little slower.

How are CRT monitors different from CRT TVs?

In TVs, redraw speeds were basically set in stone, as were some decoding details.

When each part happened was still synchronized from the received broadcast signal, but the speed was basically fixed, as that made things easier.

On color TV there were some extra details, but a good deal worked the same way.

Early game consoles/computers just generated a TV signal, so that you could use the TV you already had. Which was slightly awkward to do, but a lot cheaper than something dedicated)

After that, CRT monitors started out as adapted CRT TVs, and it didn't take long at all before speed at which things are drawn was configurable. By the nineties it wasn't too unusual to drive a CRT monitor at 56, 60, 72, 75, perhaps 85, and sometimes 90(verify), 100, or 120Hz.

We also grew an increasing amount of resolutions that the monitor should be capable of displaying. Or rather, resolution-refresh combinations. Detecting and dealing that is a topic in and of itself.

Yet at the CRT level, they were driven much the same way - synchronization timing to let the monitor know when and how fast to sweep the beams around, and a stream of pixels passed through as they arrive on the wires.

So a bunch of the TV mechanism lived on into CRT monitors - and even into the flatscreen era.

Flatscreens

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

For context: in film, and in CRTs, the mechanism that lights up the screen is the is the same mechanism as the one that shows you the image. And, as a result, blinky.

LCD-style flatscreens, the image updates and the lighting are now different mechanisms.

Basically, each pixel blocks light, and there is one big white area behind all the pixels.

If you take a high speed camera, you may still not see it flicker this part of the same slow motion video (note how the backlight appears constant even when the pixel update is crawling by) until you get really fast and specific.

So the difference between, say, a 60fps and 240fps monitor isn't in the lighting, it's how fast the light-blocking pixels in front of that constant backlight change. A 60fps monitor changes its pixels every 16ms (1/60 sec), a 240fps the latter every 4ms (1/240 sec). The light just stays on.

As such, while a CRT at 30Hz would look very blinky and be hard on the eyes, a flatscreen at 30fps updates looks choppier, but not blinkier or more eyestrainy.

On sending and updating pixels

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

see also

Visuals_DIY#Analog_video_notes

Monitor mounts

VESA mounts

The sizes are often one of:

• 7.5 cm x 7.5 cm (2.95 inches), 8kg max
• 10 cm x 10 cm (3.94 inches), 12kg max
• 20 cm x 20 cm (7.87 inches), 50kg+

...though there are smaller and larger variants, and also non-square ones.

Most products will have holes to fit more than one.

10cm was apparently the original, 7.5cm was added for smaller displays, though note that lightish displays could use either.

See also:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Display_Mounting_Interface