12V LED Display – LG W2286L HDMI Display – Possibly Perfect for Africa

Aside from overpriced (£220), touchscreen monitors for cars, 12V Monitors are extremely difficult to obtain. In the good old days of 2006, Newegg and other retailers had 2 or 3 15″ XGA monitors with an external PSU but this side of the pond it was limited to a single Acer model and that was soon abandoned.

Now everything has a brick PSU (AC to DC) built in. You convert AC from the mains to 5V DC (sometimes 12V DC) to run the display. Great for reducing cable clutter but awful if you are off grid because then you are taking 12V Solar Power, converting it to AC in an inverter (10-15% loss), then converting back from AC to DC inside the monitor (probably a similar loss).

Our motto aspires to be Direct Current Computing and we want things to be as optimized for solar as possible. This means DC computers (all but the D1 and D2 have DC inputs), DC servers (the new B2 is 12V DC input), and DC Monitors. Nothing wasted on inverters. Everything kept simple.

I’m worried my blog has become a bit of a LG fanboy site (perhaps the only LG fansite?), but a new monitor due out imminently has a lot of potential for us. 2 x HDMI and 1 x DVI ports hardly matters but it does have a VGA port, and apparenly achieves its slim design by having the brick external.

PC Pro gives it poor marks for this clumsiness but for Africa it could be great – a high quality, low power display that two students can share (a 1920×1200 model is also coming out) for about £200, or what a 10.4″ 800×600 display typically goes for.