Steve Lusardi wrote:

You will find that finding a 12 V or 24 V DC LCD screen is very difficult at
best. You will also find that when found for marine use, they are very
expensive. There are reasons for this beyond those very valid caveats made
bt Larry. One of which is black is not black. Most screens glow somewhat
when displaying black. Marine screens do not, as protection of night vision
is pretty importsnt on a bridge. But your requirement is not a ship's bridge
and can be met with an inexpensive computer display that runs off AC with
the use of the low wattage sine wave inverters. The good ones do not radiate
and are amazingly efficient. If you want to keep this screen inexpensive,
you may find that you will have to drop your contrast ratio spec of 1000 to
1 to 800 to 1.
Steve


I didn't know that about marine screens. The non-glow thing.
Interesting point and maybe the extra bucks are not just fools gold.

Plain old flat panel computer monitors are certainly cheap enough these days.

The 1000:1 ratio is pretty old fashioned stuff these days at least among
computer monitors. Some of them are amazingly high.
I didn't see anything in the 1280 x ? resolution at less than 1000:1.

A good 18" matte finished display (Dell?) was about $125 or so.

The inverter is going to be the trick that makes the rabbit pop out of the hat.
If it can run the CPU and the display, I think I'd quit there.

The one I had before was not a true sine wave output - but a stair step
sorta sine wave. Some things did not so well with that (actually died
at first sight!) I'm sure things have improved since then (10 years?).
But how would one know before hand???

Lastly, I need a simple way to switch from inverter to shore power.
Probably easiest would be to have a 110 connection - one socket marked
shore power, the other marked inverter and a single plug to the system.
Plug it into one or the other?


Surely ought to do a good job discharging the house batteries!