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Review on Enhance Your Raspberry Pi with Kuman's 7" Capacitive Touchscreen Display by Michael Marshall

Revainrating 4 out of 5

Overall a good choice for the price but it scratches easily and still has some smoothing.

Got this to upgrade my "Micro-PC" RPi from a much older but very similar 800x480. First, many 1024x600 displays of this type and size actually have an internal resolution of 800x480. To be honest I don't know how they can advertise in 1024x600 when they have 840x480 but they do it anyway and get away with it. It really does look like a true 1024x600, so the problems with fitting a decent amount of onscreen elements are gone - at least in width (600 still limits the height a bit, but if you set up the interface properly it's not bad.) I have a small complaint. The screen itself is actually glass as advertised, however the top cover is made from exceptionally soft plastic. I *barely* cut him with a screwdriver with almost no effort, and just because of that he made a huge, ugly wound. It had shipping protection, but it stuck out and got in the way in places. So when I put it in my system case, it caught on the edge and came loose, allowing dust and bubbles to get in, so I ended up getting it out. from what I now regret. I think it's better to try to carefully cut off the excess parts of the shipping profile. You seem to be able to control the screen over it, so I'd leave it on if it doesn't mess up. However I think they could make everything on the screen a bit better quality so it doesn't get damaged as easily (and they obviously expect you to remove the shipping screen protector rather than use it with it as it protrudes excessively and when reassembled catches easily.) In fact, if it has a plastic coating that scratches, then there really is absolutely no reason to use glass at all. It just makes it a lot more vulnerable to a very bad hack with little or no use, so I think it was a bad choice on their part. Otherwise I have basically nothing to complain about. It probably can't improve much at this price point, but at least for me it's worth noting that it still has fairly limited color options and relies heavily on anti-aliasing. Much smaller than the predecessor it replaces, but still lacks the strong color gamut you'd find in a decent PC monitor, and IPS panels or not, the overall color quality just doesn't even measure up to a good PC monitor. Monitor with TN panel. However, it's difficult to make them of really good quality without skyrocketing the price considering how much of the base cost comes from the components that make this thing work in the first place. So it is unlikely that you will find anything better in this area. A lot of people might not see anti-aliasing anyway due to the small pixel size, but they might also have trouble reading full-resolution text and might still be better off with a lower resolution or a larger screen size, whichever I'm not sure about am like. That's important, but I suspect it matters if the plan is to use it for anything that involves a lot of color. I plan to play videos on Youtube or something like that sometimes, so it makes a difference for me. However, I give it 4/5, because there is probably not much room for improvement in this price range. It can be done better, but it doesn't make sense when it costs more than $100 for most of us. And this particular one even manages to cost less than most other true 1024x600 screens of this size so I'd say for its price range it's probably the best you'll get and basically it's just something what to look out for. Keep that in mind if you buy one of these no matter what and it's still way better than the old one I had. I also wish it had a backlight setting, but sadly none of those. (Even just a potentiometer on the back would be better than nothing. I'm pretty sure there's nothing in the HDMI protocols for adjusting the backlight.) I have another big complaint about the screen, and they fix that: the internal real physical screen is mounted in a smaller outer frame. That black color on top (probably part of the digitizer?) is actually blocking a few pixels on each side of the screen. Sometimes it's a little frustrating. It's only a few pixels (probably two or so) and you can see underneath if you rotate a sufficient angle, but it's a little annoying and maybe makes it look a bit

Pros
  • A sea of positive emotions
Cons
  • There are downsides

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