[callum85]

This is disappointing. This screen is 7" at 800x480, so its sharpness is about 133 PPI (pixels per inch).

For comparison, my original Android G1 (several years ago) was 180 PPI, and it looked shit.

This is $60 plus taxes and shipping. I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

[leoedin]

It's expensive because the economies of building electronics are weird. As they said in their announcement, a big challenge is getting a display which is guaranteed to be available for a long period of time. That means not buying the bleeding edge, but something designed for lower volume markets. If you want something that's available for a long time, the likelihood is that it's already been available for a while. If you want the bleeding edge, it means they'll stop making it and start making the new bleeding edge in 18 months (with subtly different connectors, sizes, drivers etc)

The vast majority of the cost of this display is driven by factors unrelated to the technology level. Labour to build it, logistical costs, EMC qualification etc. That's the case for almost all cheap consumer electronics.

[sangnoir]

>I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (plus a camera and RAM and stuff). Including taxes and shipping. Why is this so expensive?

Sales volumes determine economies of scale, it is likely the £28 tablet was made in quantities much larger than the pi screen (I'd guess at least 2 orders of magnitude).

Also, not all screens are equal. It's not just resolution: there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and response time. On the non-technical side mentioned on the blog, they mentioned they wanted a manufacture who would make the panel for a long time. I would bet a dollar that Pi screen beats the £28-tablet display on all the above parameters

[creshal]

> there's colour reproduction, viewing angles, brightness, contrast and response time.

Which seem to be all crap for this panel anyway – 70° viewing angles implies it's the cheapest TN panel they could find.

For a non-profit(!) like the RPi foundation that can neither guarantee sales nor buy them in advance in massive bulks, availability is the only factor that really matters.

[userbinator]

Indeed. They mention it's an "industrial" panel, which in my experience seems to mean "low contrast and brightness, narrow viewing angle, but wider temperature range[1]". The Innolux panel I mentioned in another comment here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10185433 ) is an example of this type.

[1] http://www.pacificdisplay.com/lcd_temp_range.htm

[callum85]

But the £28 one comes with RAM, CPU, wifi sensor, camera, and it's two thirds of the price. Even if the other screen specs (brightness, viewing angle etc) are really terrible on the £28-tablet and incredible on the raspberry pi display, this still seems very expensive, and the difference seems like more than just an economy of scale thing.

[sangnoir]

I mentioned 3 things that might explain the price difference in my comment, not just economies of scale. I should have been clearer

1. Economies of scale

2. Difference in quality of the display

3. Booking factory capacity in advance (there's likely a huge opportunity cost to the manufacturer)

[jon-wood]

I bought one of those £28 Android tablets from Amazon to experiment with for work a while back. The thing was utterly unusable - it turns out the hardware you can get for £28 is just barely enough to boot to the Android launcher. Don't even think about doing anything crazy like opening a web browser, or reading an eBook on it.

[icebraining]

You had poor luck; I've used one of those for a couple of months and all my heavier apps (Firefox, Aldiko and Komik Reader) worked fine, albeit the memory pressure was felt (background apps were immediately dropped when opening a new one). You can easily get a tablet with 1GB of RAM for less than £28, which is equivalent to my Nexus 7 (2012), which I still use every day.

[ekianjo]

> I just found a 7-inch tablet for £28 ($43.10) on Amazon (

Good luck taking the screen apart and making it work on Raspberry Pi.

[TeamMCS]

This seems so common with prototype parts. I'm not sure what the difficulty is building a sheild which you can just drop on a commodity component.

Mass producing a PCB is 'fairly' simple these days assuming the quantity is sufficient.

Anyone have any insights into the cost?

[makomk]

It's a Pi accessory, and one where the RPi Foundation have a lock on the market - because all display output configuration goes through the binary GPU blob, they control what displays you can use with your Pi.