Stretched TFT LCD from Craft Data Limited

Craft Data are pleased to introduce their “Bar Type”, “Letterbox” or “Stretch” style TFT LCD panels from their newest partner CDTECH. These wide format colour LCDs are becoming increasingly popular in all areas of our lives from digital car dashboards and white goods to digital signage displays that we now see on our trains and buses.

With previously limited availability of small colour TFT LCD in the landscape or letterbox orientation many industrial equipment manufacturers were limited to the numerous options in monochrome STN LCD or a few PMOLED options.  With the introduction of our range of letterbox format TFT LCD we feel we can offer engineers and designers a real alternative when looking to transition from a monochrome to colour display.   

The comprehensive range currently has thirteen different display sizes with the 8.8” size available in four different options, several new models are also under development and scheduled to be released in early 2017. Sizes start from a 2.9”, 320 x 120 resolution, 2.5:1 aspect ratio display through to an IPS technology panel, 12.3”, 1920 x 720 resolution, 8:3 aspect ratio panel. The complete list of available panel sizes is shown below: –

The focus across the whole range has been to offer a high specification panel suitable for the industrial product market also incorporating the highly demanding automotive and aerospace industries.  All the panels would be considered as high brightness solutions with brightness’s of between 500 cd/m² and 1000 cd/m² apart from the 2.9” and 4.2” sizes that whilst do not offer direct sunlight viewing properties still offer a high luminance of 300 cd/m² and 280 cd/m² respectively. The larger panels within the range, (9.2” and upwards) also come with a wide operating temperature of -30°C ~ +85°C as standard making them suitable for a host of applications in hostile and highly demanding environments. Although not available across the complete range several of the panels have the increasingly popular LVDS interface making use of this now common interface on the majority of today’s single board computers.  We are also seeing the introduction of the MIPI interface (mobile industry processor interface) on three of the current panels which up until now has only really been used for smartphone displays but is now starting to become an alternative interface to the RGB and LVDS versions in certain applications.

Five of the panels within the range, the 7.9”, 9.2”, 10.25”, 11.9” and 12.3” utilize IPS (In-plane switching) technology which produces an exceptionally wide viewing angle on all axis (170° left to right and 170° top to bottom).  Another benefit of the IPS Technology is that there is no factory pre-set 6 or 12 o’clock viewing direction allowing for greater flexibility in mounting the panels in both portrait and landscape orientation. Touch options are available on all sizes with the smaller (2.9”, 3.9”, 4.2”, 4.6” & 5.8”) sizes having a 4-wire resistive overlay, although there are plans to introduce capacitive touch sensors for these sizes over the coming months.  The larger panels (6.5”, 7.2”, 7.9”, 8.8”, 9.2”, 10.2”, 11.9” and 12.3”) all have the latest projected capacitive touch sensor with cover lens.

If you are looking for a plug and play monitor kit type solution both the 12.3”, 10.25” and 8.8” sizes can also be supplied with a compact HDMI driver board, LED backlight driver and OSD keyboard including all internal cabling making a cost-effective display solution which can be quickly and easily integrated into your bespoke housing. This aspect of the range will be expanded upon over the coming months, so please do check back with us.