I have an 8" with similar spec and provenance I use for easily portable fixing stuff. It's an Eyoyo S801H with HDMI and VGA. If I get round to it tomorrow, I'll see what it does with the resolutions you mention.

Cool, let me know how it works. 😀 To be honest, as long as it handles text mode & 320x200 (i.e. 400 line modes) @ 70Hz I'd be happy, but a decently robust VGA implementation would be pretty sweet.

yeah I am interested in knowing if it works as well - a small display to help with testing/repair is a must!

Sorry, busy days and a power outage just when I had time to do stuff delayed this. Will try again today.

Right, gotten around to it at last.

The monitor is an Eyoyo S801H with 1024x768 resolution (the S801H is also sold with 800x600). It has VGA, HDMI, composite and Ypbpr input support, but VGA is the main interest here. It claims only to support 800x480, 800x600 and 1024x768 input at 60Hz, but that's far from the whole story.

Firstly the panel is a TN pig, with remarkably clear and crisp image quality if you are directly in front of it, but with major deviation of hue and saturation as soon as there are any angles involved. But this isn't a screen for long hours working or enjoying films, so that doesn't really matter.

What does is the input. With HDMI it's what you would expect. With VGA, it can do quite a bit more. I've taken a few pictures to illustrate, but I couldn't get my damned camera to focus on the screen, so apoligies for the fuzzy pictures.

Firstly it handles DOS text modes fine, here's the POST of my Tyan Tsunami:

It does a better job at scaling and centering than my high-end Iiyama CRT, but takes its time to get there - the first few seconds at a resolution/refresh rate are visibly wobbly as the algorithm searches for optimal settings. It also takes a while to lock onto a signal when changing modes- so not ideal for the very first POST messages.

Then the all-important 720x400@70Hz:

Looks good enough to me 😀

Finally I booted into Windows 98 and played around with different resolutions and refresh rates.

This was interesting. Basically it accepted any resolution I could feed it, although anything over native (i.e. 1280x1024) looked awful. Interpolation at lower resolutions wasn't too bad. The interesting bit was refresh rates. It accepts input up to 75Hz. With 85Hz it gives an out-of-range error. Now I'd expect that its native frequency would be 60Hz and that there would be no visible difference above that. Wrong! Something looked different at 70 and particularly 75Hz. I used the display of my camera as a poor man's stroboscope and it helped show clear differences in displayed refresh rate. This screen actually goes up to 75Hz output!

All in all, it does the job I bought it for: a tiny but usable screen for installation, troubleshooting etc. I already knew that, but now I can also say it's great under DOS in both text and graphics modes, and that if you do want to stare at it for hours, you can get it to give you 75Hz. Not bad for a few EUR from AliExpress 😉

nice to know dionb thanks for testing

Awesome dude, thanks for looking into it! Definitely something I'd have a ton of use for. I might grab the Eyoyo 1024x600 panel in that case (which looks a lot like that one, just 168 pixels shorter. 😜) Although I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of them out there are using the same panels & driver/scaler circuitry.

>$50-100 for that
>cheap

No. go to craigslist, can get used 22"+ 1680x1050/1080p lcds for $25. plenty of 1280x1024 & 1024x768 lcds as well.

awgamer wrote:

>$50-100 for that
>cheap

No. go to craigslist, can get used 22"+ 1680x1050/1080p lcds for $25. plenty of 1280x1024 & 1024x768 lcds as well.

I don't want a 22"+ 1680x1050 LCD. I want something small, on a little stand, that I can chuck in a bag with my DJ gear or sit on a narrow shelf, which can display both VGA & composite video. In other words, absolutely nothing about what you said even slightly matches my use case, but you seem awfully eager to tell other people what to do.

xjas wrote:

Awesome dude, thanks for looking into it! Definitely something I'd have a ton of use for. I might grab the Eyoyo 1024x600 panel in that case (which looks a lot like that one, just 168 pixels shorter. 😜) Although I wouldn't be surprised if 80% of them out there are using the same panels & driver/scaler circuitry.

Possibly, but it might be totally different...

This one is still available with free shipping to US as well on Aliexpress, so I'd recommend that over an untested one, particularly as your use case wants 4:3 and the other one is 16:9...

xjas wrote:

awgamer wrote:

>$50-100 for that
>cheap

No. go to craigslist, can get used 22"+ 1680x1050/1080p lcds for $25. plenty of 1280x1024 & 1024x768 lcds as well.

I don't want a 22"+ 1680x1050 LCD. I want something small, on a little stand, that I can chuck in a bag with my DJ gear or sit on a narrow shelf, which can display both VGA & composite video. In other words, absolutely nothing about what you said even slightly matches my use case, but you seem awfully eager to tell other people what to do.

and absolutely nothing you posted until now included a use case. I'm awfully eager to point out how that's not cheap, or maybe it's as you say and I'm a dictator telling my subjects to get a good deal. hmm.

awgamer wrote:

and absolutely nothing you posted until now included a use case. I'm awfully eager to point out how that's not cheap, or maybe it's as you say and I'm a dictator telling my subjects to get a good deal. hmm.

The OP was clear, but you took the opportunity to show us your “smarts” anyway. You’ve also assumed that he has access to craigslist but hot tip, there are places in the world that don’t 😀

badmojo wrote:

The OP was clear, but you took the opportunity to show us your “smarts” anyway. You’ve also assumed that he has access to craigslist but hot tip, there are places in the world that don’t 😀

Or where Craigslist is a barren wasteland.

badmojo wrote:

awgamer wrote:

and absolutely nothing you posted until now included a use case. I'm awfully eager to point out how that's not cheap, or maybe it's as you say and I'm a dictator telling my subjects to get a good deal. hmm.

The OP was clear, but you took the opportunity to show us your “smarts” anyway. You’ve also assumed that he has access to craigslist but hot tip, there are places in the world that don’t 😀

Yes, clearly my purpose was to show how smart I am, not taking issue with "cheap."

I decided to grab the Eyoyo S801H off AliX, it worked out to about ten bucks more than what the 1024x600 version was going for on Ebay but I think I'll appreciate the extra vertical room (especially for Ableton Live use.) To be honest, I forgot that size even existed when I started the thread. 😜

I also grabbed a 5.6", 800x480 version, in kit form (panel + PCB) off Ebay, since I had a coupon that was about to expire. I hope the VGA performance is similar to the S801H but I won't be that disappointed if it's not. I have a specific use in mind for this and it's probably a better fit than trying to make a 7" panel do dual-duty. I'll give it my own review when it gets here.

awgamer wrote:

absolutely nothing you posted until now included a use case. I'm awfully eager to point out how that's not cheap, or maybe it's as you say and I'm a dictator telling my subjects to get a good deal. hmm.

Yeesh dude, maybe my post came off as harsher than intended, but what you suggested had literally nothing to do with the discussion at hand. I was looking for a comparison of a specific class of hardware that's available from online sellers, not "how do I get the cheapest monitor??" I do have a local Craigslist and am fully aware of how to get cheap full-size displays off it, but that's not what this thread is about.

In the end, it's a free forum & you can post what you want, but starting a reply with "No." and then explaining how you think the OP is Doing It Wrong, without even reading the original post, isn't going to enamour anyone to what you have to say.

Out of curiosity, what are you using to test 720x400@70Hz? I have a few devices I want to try at this resolution to see if they work.

720x400@70Hz is standard DOS text mode, which is why it's so important. Many BIOSes use the mode for the setup, and on most video cards, the 320x200 video mode that so many games run in is scanline-doubled and shown in the same 720x400@70Hz mode. It's basically the mode you spend 90% of your time in on a retro PC!

XCVG wrote:

Out of curiosity, what are you using to test 720x400@70Hz? I have a few devices I want to try at this resolution to see if they work.

I used Battle Isle, as it was the first DOS game I found that would run on the testPC without sound cards (the rest are all configged for SBPro 2.0 and/or General Midi and didn't want to run with no sound devices). But any (non-VESA) DOS VGA game would do the trick 😉

Actually it's not 720x400@70Hz, but 640x400@70Hz (upscaled from 320x200). See this post for a more detailed explanation:

So if you are playing a DOS video game which uses IBM mode 13h (320x200x256 colors), then it will display with a vertical refresh rate of ~69.9Hz, which your LCD monitor may 'see' as 720x400 @70Hz (dot clock 28.322MHz) because it is 'broken'. The LCD monitor should 'see' the video input as 640x400 @70Hz (dot clock 25.125MHz) but it may be that LCD monitor manufacturers would display VGA text modes 03h/07h and graphics mode 13h identically by hardware scaling.

Interesting. Is this a standard thing, that 320x200 displayed as 640x400@70Hz, different to text mode at 720x400@70Hz? Some of my old CRTs used to struggle with 640x400 but 720x400 (text) and 320x200 were always fine, so I figured they must be using the same timing on the analogue output.