ELECROW 5-inch Resistive Touchscreen Raspberry Pi Mornitor

I've been looking around for a small HDMI LCD screen to use as a seconday screen with Windows and it took a few months of research on and off before deciding on the Elecrow 5" HDMI monitor. For the most part, it took me a while because a lot of reviews here and on other sites were primarily about use and config with Raspberry Pi.Thanks to reviewer Alan who gave a good review with plenty of photos that convinced me to go for it. Not sure if it's just how Amazon stores user review videos but the video review was a bit pixelated so it was hard to appreciate the clarity of the screen but it seemed to be what I was looking for.Having used it for a few months now I still can't believe how clear and sharp the screen is! There are sadly no controls for brightness, colour, saturation or contrast but everything displayed looks very nice and accurate.Usually when you see the resolution 800x480 you think how bad that looks when your PC doesn't have the right drivers installed and it looks blocky. I know it's all relative and about DPI but once I had it all connected and tested it was sharp and clear, almost HD. I wish I had bought one sooner as it is exactly what I was looking for having tried a Lilliput monitor.As I'm using this with Windows, I've not needed to look through the included driver utility disc and not tried the resistive touchscreen so I can't comment on those. Windows just detects it as a second display and lets me extend my desktop. No drivers needed. The box contains the LCD screen, a HDMI bridge connector that neatly connects the HDMI socket on the top of the screen to the HDMI socket on the Raspberry Pi when mounted together. Standoffs for mounting are also supplied plus a plastic stylus.Here are some of the good points that I like:+ It shows the video feed straightaway without any fancy splash screens or slow initialisation pauses. This was one of the annoyances with Lilliput monitor was a slow bright blue screen on power on before it would think about showing the feed. I know it's only a few seconds but I specifically wanted instant feed on power on for future uses.+ Runs off a single micro USB (socket also at the top next to HDMI socket) connected to PC USB so no additional external power adapters or sockets needed. It powers down whenever my PC is scheduled to power down so no lingering standby. Some motherboard USB ports do still continue to supply power for charging devices so your experience may differ.+ I was hoping for an on/off switch but no it only has a backlight switch which I wasn't sure about to begin with but I've since found it very useful and better. I was thinking about buying a micro USB cable designed for Raspberry Pi with an inline power switch built in but for now the brightness switch is fine. As a blessing in disguise, it prevents Windows/DirectShow from blinking all screens when it realises a monitor has been disconnected, that blink would often cause the video on my TV app to freeze. Turning off backlight doesn't cause DirectShow to have a fit.+ Small and light enough that I have it attached to a gooseneck arm so can position it how I need. I was going to buy one of those mobile phone gooseneck arms but I kept reading reviews of some not even being able to cope with weight of a smartphone without drooping so I've used a photographic gooseneck clamp which is a bit overkill but no droop!- The only negative I can think of is the availability or lack of screen cases with cutouts to suit the position of the HDMI and USB sockets on this. The Elecrow has its HDMI and USB socket at the top edge of screen and nearly all cases I have looked at are designed for screens with HDMI and USB on the right edge. I've had to import one from China that had the cutouts for this screen. Took about 2 weeks to arrive. Wish I'd have ordered two cases at the same time to avoid the wait as I'm impressed with the clarity of Elecrow I hope to buy another one in near future.! Just one more thing Columbo! I had originally wanted to buy Revision B of this screen with capacitive touch screen because it has OSD menu buttons. I can't find any manuals but I'm hoping that OSD buttons allows settings for brightness as that was my other preferred criteria. Having said that, I think it would be even more impossible to find suitable case due to the positions of sockets and extra menu buttons on Revision B screen. Maybe Elecrow could provide some insight on available cases?To solve the lack of brightness control I have just used a pieces of tinted acetate so that lessens the brightness if I'm using at night.

I bought this for a mini arcade project. For most use cases at this scale, you kinda want to keep things as much “behind” the screen as you can. And other screens all had big chunky cables coming directly from the right side which makes it impossible without modifications.This one has a connection at the top which was a great start, but also comes with a handy “U” connector which helps even further.Placement of connectors for project monitors is a big deal, so it’s certainly worth knowing.Screen quality is good/clear. I didn’t care much for the touch screen stuff, so wiring it up required simply 5V and GND as well as the HDMI cable, so no need to mount the Pi if not necessary, especially if you want to be hooking up extras to the Pi. But for those that want to, it mounts very nicely adding no extra width/height dimensions.You’re not going to get perfect for this price. But this one is very good and worth every penny.

Arrvied VERY quickly, and easy to set up and get working. The box and packaging it came it is very neat and protected the screen well.Package includes the screen, HDMI adapter, mounting hardware, a touch stylus, and a DVD that is filled with pre-setup Raspberry Pi images! These images especially are really useful as I was up and running in minutes with no configuration needed and everything working. The touch screen was already calibrated and worked out of the box on the pre-made images.The DVD also contains the manual, and also the 'config.txt' file which means you can just drop it onto any other Pi distro and it just works. They have also included the touch driver and instructions too which makes it simple. The included DVD really helped out a bunch, no downloading of anything was required it even included the tools to load the .img onto the SD card :)The screen is great quality, and is bright and clear. The touchscreen adds protection to the actual LCD panel itself so the whole thing feels robust. It is also possible to use it as an external laptop screen (providing you can set 800x480 resolution in your control panel, I found the my nVidia control panel allowed me to set custom sizes and it worked).The screen is larger than the Pi3 itself, and if you were mounting it in an enclosure the extra mounting posts would make it easy to attach to a flat surface from behind. The USB and Ethernet ports are full available and don't protrude or stick out which is nice. There are solder pads with SPI and 5V + GND labelled that can be used for other IO (the SPI pads are used for the touch screen so don't re-use these unless you know what you are doing).Overall very happy, much neater than having a giant HDMI cable plugged into a monitor that needs a PSU etc.. now all I need is a single USB cable and I can mess around with my Pi easily :)