 This week we took these five extremely different displays and went through each and every one on how they work, how to wire them up, and how to control them with code. In this video I want to compare all of the displays, their qualities, their negatives, the pros and cons, and then at the end I'll tell you which one I think is the best one. Right off the bat I want to start off with the build of the display, if it's strong, if it's fragile. In the TFT display video I showed you that I had two TFT displays, one with a cracked screen, and one with liquid damage that wasn't even watered, liquid that it was supposed to dip in and actually continue to work in, and the liquid still managed to get between the screen and stop it from working. These TFT displays are actually built pretty well, but the problem is every time I use one for a project I need at least two or three of them to get the project done because they keep breaking on. So when it comes to build, this one is definitely the worst. When it comes to the ePaper display, the Dot Matrix display, and the OLED display, they're all kind of good enough. They're stronger than the TFT display, but definitely no match for this LCD display. This LCD display is extremely thick. It does have some electronics on the back, but it has these nice kind of rubber bumpers that stop you from hitting the electronics, and they're like the first point of contact when you back them up onto something. And then you have the actual LCD display, which is encased in what I want to say is steel or aluminum. It's really strong. It's really strong border over here, something that none of these other options have. So this one definitely is the best when it comes to strength. Next up is power usage. Right off the bat, I'm going to let you know that even though the TFT, the LCD, the Dot Matrix, and the OLED are pretty good on power, and each one is better in different situations, like if you're only using one or two LEDs on the Matrix, you're not going to be using the full power as if you were using all 64 LEDs. Same thing with the OLED. It has no backlight. It just displays the pixels on the screen, and that's it. So if you're not using all the pixels, you're not using that much power. With this, it has a backlight, so that will drain some power, but again, it's not that big of a deal. And then same thing with this one. But when we're talking about overall usage, nothing compares to this e-paper display. It's actually not connected. It doesn't have a battery. And it's still displaying the last thing we put on here from the previous video. So when it comes to power usage, this thing is absolute king. Now brightness. When it comes to brightest out of all of these, it's obviously going to be the LED Matrix. It was so bright in the video that we had to turn it off just to continue doing the video because it was actually blinding me. But all of these have pretty good nighttime visibility except for the E-ink display. Next up is display brightness. When it comes to all of these, 1000%, the brightest one is the Dot Matrix. This thing was so bright that during the video I had to turn it off because it was blinding me. Then we have the TFT display and the LCD display, which both have backlights that light behind the pixels on the screen and make the image brighter. So obviously those two in nighttime will be fine. You have the OLED, which does not have a backlight, which is what allows it to be so thin and small. But the pixels on these are so bright and the screen in its default state is so dark. And it works just fine at night. The E-paper display doesn't have a backlight and it doesn't actually have pixels. It just works off of contrast of black over white or white over black. So if you were to use one of these in a project that involves nighttime, you would probably have to have some sort of nightlight shine on this screen or you'd have to use your phone to reflect the light off of this just to see what's written. When it comes to screen space limitations, I'd say this one obviously wins the E-paper display. In most space, it can do shapes, sizes, and even drawings. Then you have the TFT display and the OLED, which I'd say are pretty comparable, except for the fact that the OLED is much smaller, but it can do animations. It can do different shapes and sizes and all that. It can match these two in that in those terms. So I'd say this thing is actually pretty good. Then we'd have to deal with the dot matrix and the LCD, which I think are both awful for lots of information. The dot matrix can pretty much do one letter at a time. You can connect a bunch of them together and kind of have a billboard style, but that's just more money and more complexity for nothing when you can have all these other options. The LCD display can do text and different information and have animated text, but it can't really do shapes. It can't do any sort of graphs or other information. It's limited to text just like this dot matrix. So there's really not much when it comes to that. Then we have what really matters, which is the price and the options that you have with the TFT display. You have plenty of options, but not all of them will work for Arduinos. As you get larger, you're going to have to use more powerful processors because these things are complicated. One thing I should note is this TFT display is touch screen and it has an SD card module built into it. So while it might be more expensive than some of the other options here, it's pretty much a three in one type of deal, whereas these are you see what you get. So pretty much I would organize it into three different sections. I would have the super cheap, which is the LCD and the dot matrix. These are the ones that you use with absolutely no budget. Like you can get some of these for, I think, under a dollar depending on where you buy them. This thing might be a little bit more expensive, but I have seen dot matrixes for really cheap. Then in the middle, I would have something like this OLED. You can get this for really cheap, but not only that, you can get it in packs of five or 10, which gives you a bunch of options if one breaks and something happens, or if you want to use multiple of them. And then I would do a category where you have the more expensive, the TFT being expensive and then the ePaper being extremely expensive comparing to all these. I think for the price of this, I bought two TFTs, a pack of five of these OLEDs, two LCDs and then one dot matrix. So you could have all that or one singular ePaper display. But there are different sizes that you can get cheaper, more expensive. This one is the 4.2 inch, so it's pretty big. Also, when it comes to different sizes on the OLED, there's not really many options. It's more, do you want it to be a wider like rectangle type or more square like this one? Now it's time for me to tell you which one I think is the best. Personally, I love these OLED displays. You could display information on them. They're low power, they're small, but you can still display a bunch of stuff on the screen. They're fresh quickly, they're cheap. I buy them in packs of five and I have still yet to have one break on me. The nice thing with these is you can use multiple of them if you really need that much information or you can animate text or whatever on the screen, move it around. They're really the best of both worlds. I'd say the only crutch with these is how small they are. If they were any bigger, they would blow all these out the water. With no budget on a project and it doesn't require you to do anything specific that all these could do, I would take obviously the e-paper display. This thing is the most visually appealing. It could do graphs, it could work without power. So if the power goes out and there's an error before the power goes out, the error would still be on the screen. Like there's a million reasons why this is definitely a great option, but the price just doesn't make it worth it. The TFT display is probably the best idea out of all of these. You have touch, you have a screen, and then you have an SD card module, but I would say the execution is terrible. If you look at all of these, they all have mounting holes on them. This one does not. If you look at all of them, this one is extremely thick other than the dot matrix. Even this one is what I would consider thick and it's still not as thick as the TFT display. I mean, just look how thin these two are, especially the OLED. And that's definitely something to take into account when you're trying to make something a little smaller and conspicuous versus having this massive screen. And then LCD and the dot matrix. I really haven't found many uses for them. We did a project a while back where we did an alarm clock with one of these LCD displays, but that's because I didn't have the OLED display that I have now and I would totally do it with this instead of that. I guess the last like honorable mention category would be the complexity of using one of these. And when it comes to it, they're all relatively simple. This one's really good at doing text and whatnot, but if you need any shapes or any type of big data, it's awful. It has so many pins and needs a whole wiring diagram. So yeah, this one is pretty annoying to set up. You have your dot matrix, which luckily for me, I have the five pin one. If you don't have this one with the chip inside, you're gonna need to connect at least 16 cables just to use this, which is a lot of work. So that kind of sucks. Then you have your TFT display, which connects directly into the top of your Arduino. Super easy, super simple, only if it worked. You have your OLED, which is probably the easiest one. It's four cables and it comes unsoddered. So if you wanna do your own cables to keep it even thinner to not have big pins like these sticking out, you could do that so you can keep it just as thin. And then you have your EEG display, which comes with its own connector here and a cable that I have right here, which is also really nice and simple. And yeah, it's a lot of cables, but it's a lot better than having to use one of those. So I guess my winners and which ones you should use these two depending on your budget and whatnot, but those still have use cases, just depending on your project. But if there was no, you didn't tell me what your project was about, I would recommend these two. Well, hopefully that helped and gave you some insight on which display and what kind of projects you can use these for. If this video helped you out, please do give it a like and subscribe to the channel to see more.