Pardon my brevity, but this is a subject that I've been researching for the past few days, and I'm a bit burnt out on sorting/explaining the details.
Basically, while LCD monitor prices are starting to plummet, beautiful bare panels are still an even greater bargain off the likes of eBay. The 'guts' of an LCD monitor are the panel itself, an inverter for the backlight, and a 'controller'/'interface'/'driver'/'receiver' board that ties everything together. It seems many bare panels use a standardized LVDS/RSDS interface, and many monitors use general purpose interface boards supporting a fair range of permutations- 5v or 3v signaling, single or dual link LVDS (to the panel itself), and so forth. Examples include DigitalView's ACL-1024 and ACM-1024 products, which I've been trying to convince their resellers to sell me, thus far without response.
I assume these things can't cost *too* much to manufacture, given that they consist of one or two $3 chips, and a smattering of supporting components and connectors. Unfortunately, nobody seems to want to sell single-unit quantities to a hobbyist; the resellers in the US seem to be a bit of a "good ol' boys" club, preferring to sell at high markups to the industrial/embedded market.
It's a given that just about everyone would love a flat panel, so I'm just raising the concept for anyone at Individual Computers, Eyetech, Genesi, or anywhere else capable of marketing a product. At least a dozen companies seem to be making the boards; someone just needs to pull off the "coup" of reselling them nearer a $50 price point than the >whole_monitor prices the embedded guys are asking.
If anyone *has* sourced such a board for a reasonable price, I'd love to know where.
