Top critical review
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3.0 out of 5 starsGreat concept, flawed implementation
ByJon E Watteon February 20, 2016
I was shopping for small portable displays to put on my robot that is Raspberry Pi powered. Given that this is the "official" display, I figured I'd have the least trouble using this, so that's what I ended up getting. (I searched around on a few other sites as well; there are other options, with different trade-offs.)
As long as you update the software on your Raspberry Pi (and ideally use a Raspberry Pi 2,) this is easy to get working.
Touch and display works as advertised.
However, there are a few cons:
1) The pixels are wider than they are tall. Drawing a circle to the display will draw a laying-down oval on the screen. In this day and age, that's unbeilevably bad! If I had more time I would return it, but I don't have time to keep shopping for other displays.
2) By default, there is a backlight timeout that blanks the display until you touch it again. When developing using a real keyboard/mouse (or, better, using SSH to the RPi so I can use a big window) this becomes quite annoying.
3) The "stacked pile of circuit boards" design makes it much thicker than it needs to be. A better design would have been to put the display controller board side-by-side with the Raspberry Pi. There's enough space on the back of the display to do this, and even some mounting holes that could have been moved to make this possible. You can make it slightly slimmer if you turn the GPIO pins into the display, but that will twist the thin display cable, and the USB/network ports get blocked by a stand (if you use it.) And I really need the GPIOs!
4) The resolution is quite small. Yes, you can watch SD television on that resolution. But other options are 1024x640 or even 1280x800.
5) The black bezel surrounding the screen is very big. This is actually a problem for me; I want it as small as possible. It could easily be a centimeter slimmer on each side without losing any functionality. I don't know why they did this; it looks bad and works bad and is fragile as well.
If you need a plug-and-play thing that Just Works (tm) with the limitations I've listed above, this is the right choice. Else, maybe go look for something by Lady Ada?