I just shipped out all
screen-only orders! If you ordered just LCDs and no Shinobi Scalers, check your forum DMs or Discord for your tracking number.
Some technical info about these screens, for those interested:
- Just like the Wisecoco screens, composite video input is NOT enabled in the UT-HDMI035 driver board firmware. I've tried to get a custom firmware that enables CVBS from a few different vendors, to no avail.
- There are actually a bunch of different 3.5" 640*480 IPS panels on the market!
- Sometimes you'll see panels that have a microcontroller on the ribbon cable-- these are older panels which require the MCU to initialize the panel over SPI. (one PN I've seen is Topovision TVT0350K3-I, another is JT035P02)
- The seller sent me TXW350049C0 panels for this order, which are 'lower-cost' panels that do not require SPI initialization (either the init code is either burned into the CoG driver, or the driver board has to do it). Datasheet for it is attached.
- Wisecoco has sold both of these panel versions at different times (ones with the MCU and ones without.) Here's how the two panels look. Topovision TVT0350K3-I on left, Tianxianwei TXW350049C0 on right. Bubbles are from me removing the film:
- There are many other panel variants, but these are the only ones I have on hand.
- (Tons of smaller companies like Topovision and Tianxianwei make these LCDs. It's unclear to me who actually designs them to begin with-- maybe Eurotech or GiantPlus.)
- All of these different panel versions are IPS and have a base brightness of 400 nits. They also appear to have identical NV3052 CoG driver silicon (marked ZH035IA01A)
- That being said, the different types of panels don't always look *exactly* the same. In my tests, the colors and viewing angles between the two are very similar, but not identical. This might be a panel lottery thing, or a difference in the liquid crystal part of the panel or something.
So once you get your screens, feel free to post here about the screens' color quality and viewing angles! It's valuable info for the community and will help inform folks' purchases as well as future group buys.