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Comment by dagw | Hacker News Reader

There are a ton of Chinese brands that sell rasperryPi compatible touch screens (of very varying quality) at half the price. That being said if I actually needed a touch screen for a rasperryPi I wouldn't hesitate to spend $60 on an official screen and save myself a lot of potential hassle.

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The most of cheap "rasperryPi compatible touch screens" use SPI interface (GPIO) which has very limited data rate, only suitable for 320x240 / low FPS graphics without any kind of HW acceleration. HDMI compatible touch screen are typically more expensive than $60.

The official RPi display is great because it uses the onboard display connector (which has been useless this far).

typically more expensive than $60

No, you can certainly get them for less than that:

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Tontec-7-Raspberry-Pi-LCD-Tou...

The $60 RPi screen is higher resolution, mounts with four screws (vs this one with three separate PCBs plus the LCD), and has an interface designed to be controlled by the RPi GPIO pins. I don't think saving $17 is worth losing all of that.

These are 7-inch capacitive touch screens, less than $70 from amazon prime, same resolution (800x480), mount with 4 screws, and use HDMI for video and USB for power/touchscreen. The downside is that the touchscreen drivers are binaries. Somebody online made an open source driver that appears to work perfectly, so if you're not using Raspbian or something else their binaries are made for, you might have some driver hacking to do.

http://www.amazon.com/Waveshare-Capacitive-Interface-Android... http://www.amazon.com/SainSmart-Touch-Screen-Display-Raspber...

http://www.april1985.com/post/2015-06-28-hack-waveshare-touc...

Interestingly, the controller on all those displays can actually talk DPI, it's just never pinned out - and there are probably even cheaper DPI-only displays out there, judging from the price of devices that use them. Unfortunately they seem to be really difficult to get hold of.

You are very right with this. I've bought plenty of both. What it comes down to is that if you just want one to make a cool project or experiment with, buy the official one. The extra $ is worth it and then some on saved hassle. If you need to rig up half a dozen, or its something you want to build over and over, it starts to become worth it deal with the hassle of learning the quirks of the chinese parts.

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