[NavinF]

This. 3 years ago I built a 1mm thick 4K monitor by just mounting a bare panel to a thin laptop stand and hiding the eDP to DP board underneath. It was better than anything on the market and cost literally 3/4 as much as a normal fat and ugly monitor.

I’ll just add “Message several sellers and ask for a datasheet and 1pc price+shipping from each one” to Step 3.

[o_____________o]

Let's see some pics

[NavinF]

It doesn’t look as interesting as you’d expect. In fact it looks just like any other panel lol. These days I only use it to set up new machines in the data center: https://i.imgur.com/H7kww6U_d.webp?maxwidth=1520&fidelity=gr...

My current daily driver is the XB273K (27” 4K 120hz)

[ornornor]

Cool, do you have a way and controls to set contrast, color, brightness, temperature, etc like in factory monitors via an OSD menu?

[NavinF]

Yep! Just about any driver board that can convert between different input formats will also have an OSD.

I’m kinda surprised people have so many questions about this. I dug up the emails. I paid $176 incl shipping/tax to zjtechhk for a B156ZAN03.4 panel, eDP cable, and a MST9U11Q1 driver board (which has DP, HDMI, and USBC inputs, eDP output, and a ribbon cable to a PCB with 4 buttons to control the OSD)

It was an awesome deal at the time, but I’m pretty sure all these components are obsolete by now.

[johnwalkr]

But does it have a terrible menu system, that takes 1 button press to change the color of gaming LEDs but 10 button presses to change the input? If not, it will never compete with commercial monitors.

[NavinF]

Lol. The default keymap is indeed fairly intuitive since it hasn’t been customized by the marketing dept yet. Power, menu, up, down, input.

[foota]

Lol uh, what's the don't touch label for?

[NavinF]

It’s for factory workers that assemble laptops. Despite the label, it’s perfectly ok to touch it. There’s a flex PCB behind the label that drives the backlight and converts the eDP signal to pixels. It’s normally protected by the laptop bezel so it’s somewhat fragile. If you bend it, you’ll break traces on the PCB or pop components off.

[13of40]

Maybe I'm remembering old tech, but doesn't that also have thousands of volts in it?

[NavinF]

You are! My first laptop ~15 years ago had a super thin (1mm?) fluorescent tube below the panel where the flex PCB would be. It used thousands of volts to start the backlight.

My panel (and anything from the last decade) uses LED backlights so I would not expect anything above 60V.