Making Use Of Old LCDs?

phorm writes "Not so long ago, higher-definition LCD's used to be quite hard to come by, with laptops and other hardware tending to use old non-TFT-style LCD's which ugly bleeding colors and poor refresh. Nowadays, almost everything has a nice TFT (Thin-film-transistor) display, including laptops, PDA's, digital camera, and often even cellphones. However, not all of these devices are as dependable as they once were, and many of them end up as little more than paperweights. With TFT-LCD's by themselves still being somewhat of a pricey commodity, is there any way to salvage and use these parts for home projects? I personally have an 8" notebook display, and a 1.5" digital camera LCD which are just begging to be recycled as something useful such as a projector component, status display, or something else useful. So far I've had little luck discovering a way to get these components to work outside of the original hardware, so I was wondering if any enterprising hardware-nerds on Slashdot have had better luck than I and could offer a few pointers. Are these components doomed to end up in a landfill, or can somebody offer a way to make them useful again?"

Comments

How to connect them?

[Zweistein_42]

I think more then just ideas on what to use them *for*, the original poster would like some advice on how to connect the LCDs to a computer or MP3 player etc. I might have extra laptop screens as well - but no clue how to connect their (proprietary?) laptop wire thingamagies to the 15-pin VGA port... or the "other" port on my ATI Radeon :)

Lightbox for photography

[pie314]

I've successfully taken out the backlight panel from a few LCDs to use as lightbox for photograph transparencies. It's a nice, uniformly illuminated white panel that runs off (usually) 5Volts or so, and gives a good light for viewing photograph slides.

Re:POLL

[NanoGator]

"Should Ask Slashdot be replaced with a form that queries Google?"

No.

Seriously, there's nothing wrong in posting this question to a group of geeks like us. Interesting results can develop, and discussion is usually a good thing. Perhaps people who haven't considered recycling LCDs will be inspired, you never know.

Quitcherbitchen.

Re:Finding specifications

[Jahf]

No no no, he is better off selling them on Ebay since alot of times people need to replace these screens and can't get them from the manufacturer. Then take the money and buy the cheap LCDs.