Background: I recently acquired a beastly old projector of the 16mm variety. Given that there’s a steampunk convention coming up, I’d like to try and do something absurdly nifty with it, but I’m fresh out of 16mm film. What I do have is a more-or-less broken point-and-shoot camera with a functional LCD screen. So I’m wondering - is there any way I can hook up a camera’s LCD to either (ideally) a video ipod or suchlike or (not-so-ideally, but still interesting) my computer?
I’ve taken apart the camera, and extracted the LCD screen, and this is where I’m stuck. I’ve read, in the past, people’s accounts of trying to get laptop displays to work as monitors, and I get that it’s probably going to be (nigh) impossible to get this thing working as an easy-to-use, plug-and-play monitor.
But, I’m wondering if it would be possible to drive it directly - that is, it’s got a flat plastic wire thingy (picture) with 24 wires in it. My initial thought was that those are each one bit, and I could (theoretically) control the display with them. I was on the robotics team in high school, and I remember at one point we had a bunch of LEDs hooked up to our robot controller so we could output a binary number. I was thinking there might be some way to do something similar with my computer. I don’t necessarily need to be able to pop in a dvd and have it show up easy-peasy, but some sort of control over the screen would be awesome.
Apparently the camera it came from had a display with 118,000 pixels, though, and I don’t know how you could control that many pixels, with color, on only 24 bits, so maybe I’m off-base there. Bottom-line, any way I can get this thing running?
Alternatively, anyone know of any (fairly cheap) devices that I could use instead? Something with a small LCD screen, and an RCA in or something?
Woo, first SDMB-worthy question I’ve had since free posting!