Display: Colour vs Monochrome

Posted on Posted in Display

Several people asked me why I chose monochrome LCD display for my EFIS. Why not the colour one?

Here is why:

  1. My aircraft (RV-12) has bubble canopy, so the instrument panel is exposed to the sunlight to a great degree. So sunlight readability is very important. Monochrome display remains readable in the brightest direct t sunlight. Even high quality displays on iPhone and iPad are hard to read on the sunny day.
  2. Good bright colour LCD is quite expensive
  3. Colour display requires a bit more data transferred to it. That means performance overhead for the CPU board. Not a big problem though.
  4. I have spent too much money trying different colour displays. It was fun but it had to stop 🙂

Another big reason to make the choice I did is library availability. I didnt want to spend too much time time developing the software. Displays with KS0108 chip are quite popular and the library is very stable and It has everything I needed to build an EFIS or EMS.