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

Someone get out of bed the wrong side today?

[GrahamCox]

It's not a stupid question, just because to YOU it may be not worth the trouble/effort or within your expertise doesn't mean it isn't interesting to others. Obviously the screen does work, it was designed to show images when connected to the right sort of circuitry, so it's not alien science to be able to fix it up so it does something useful. Whether it's worthwhile is something only the individual concerned can answer, so no, the question won't die, because some people are more curious, interested and skilled than you are.

Re:Pictures.

[ffsnjb]

I've fired people for installing WebShots at my old job. It is absolutely banned from my company machines. I should blackhole the domain at my dns servers, but that would take 30 seconds away from reading slashdot, and we wouldn't want that, right?