laptop tft monitor use with desktop ?

Laptop screens are not compatible with the ouput from PC's graphics card, neither DVI nor analogue VGA. They were never designed with connection to a desktop PC in mind, and I don't know of any 'off the shelf' interfaces to achieve such a thing. If you are at an advanced level of electronics you could conceivably build an adapter to convert the analogue VGA or DVI signals to whatever the laptop screen uses, but the R&D required would far outweight the cost of a proper new 15" TFT monitor!

I did once see a laptop screen which used differential signalling (TMDS I think) which may have been similar to the DVI standard, but even then it probably wouldn't have worked. For starters, AIUI the graphics card needs to know about the screen that's connected to its DVI port, details like pixel clock etc. A laptop screen would be unable to communicate its spec to the graphics card and therefore would not work.

As for colour codes, these are manufacturer and model specific and in any case would not help you acheive what you want to do.

Dave

The screen is complete with housing. The whole thing is about 1cm thick making it a very nice compact screen.I have the rest of laptop if I did need any additional components. However I have taken screen out of housing too find inverter at bottom. I would think that by connecting power and vga or dvi lead too panel nothing further is necessary. The panel is a 15.1" XGA TFT panel nice,compact and surely worth saving. The panel is marked Torisan TFT-LCM TM150XG-02L02A

Did you read *any* of the technical reasons I gave why this will not work? The signals are incompatible as I already stated. I'm sorry if it isn't what you wanted to hear, but again- There is no DVI input or VGA input into a laptop's LCD panel, so you will not be able to achieve what you want. The laptop's graphics system has a special interface the panel uses, you cannot just attach a DVI cable to a laptop panel, plug it into a graphics card and expect it to work, it simply doesn't work like that.

You're probably thinking your laptop panel has RGB and sync inputs, am I right? If so, you're way off target. No such inputs exist on a laptop panel, so how do you expect to get it working? The most you will achieve is getting power to the screen, which is straightforward enough. But what you are trying to do is like attaching a TV aerial to a computer monitor and expecting to get a TV picture on it!

Of course, you may disregard or disbelieve the advice you requested and were given, your decision.

Dave

Sorry Dave I have been multiposting without realising that this is not acceptable or best practise.I had posted this as an addition too my first post.I had not read your reply till now.I have realised 3 mins later I posted my addition.This was a coincidence. Several people have said it cant be done easily. You are right in saying it was not the answer I wanted.I had thought it couldn't be too complicated. I have the laptop motherboard, is the required interface on this . It does surprise me ,I had thought laptops worked exactly like desktops

It is looking like I have to and will accept your explanation. I thank you for your time.

No worries, and thanks for the apology, but it's not necessary. :-)

It is part of the graphics system and part of the motherboard, nothing you can do there. Modern laptops do not have seperate graphics cards, and even if they did they wouldn't fit into a desktop PC.

Well, they basically do. However, as the display is built in and part of the system, there is no need for it to be standard analogue video or even DVI. It takes, for want of a better description, 'raw' video information directly from a chip in the graphics subsytem.

Well, you could always try and get the data for the LCD panel from the manufacturer. It's possible it uses a protocol similar to DVI (differential signalling) and I've seen a laptop screen like that (a Compaq about 4-5 years ago IIRC). However, there would still be other rather large obstacles to overcome. I'm confident if you really look into it you'll end up thinking 'to hell with that idea!' ;-)

No problem.

Dave

Yeah I had this idea a few years ago and I had an IBM netvista LCD pannel and it used differential signalling.. After a couple of weeks of research and trying to get it working all I managed to do is make the backlight work.. I said the hell with it and sold it on ebay.. : )

The panel is worth saving, but only for use in another similar model laptop. People ask this all the time but there's really no easy way to connect one to anything, they use custom programmed driver electronics specific to the particular laptop.

The required interface is on the laptop motherboard and could in theory be relocated to a PCI card but it would take some pretty advanced soldering skills to work with the high pin count surface mount stuff, I've seen a few people breadboard with it before but it's certainly not easy.

Sure.

Go to

They have PCI and analog->digital controller cards for LCDs.

It'll cost more than buying a nice complete desktop LCD monitor.

-Keith

I think if your laptop actually ran you could use this -->