The "hobbyist LCD" market doesn't get purpose designed components - not at the volumes and prices hobbyists are prepared/capable of buying. We get to re-use end-of-life components or buy the end-of-reel scraps from current product manufacture. (which is fine by me. I love being able to buy accurate 9DOF IMUs, but I sure as hell don't want to order them in reels of 10,000 un-hand-solderable SMD parts)
But of course, smartphones tend to have an LCD controller on the SoC, so you just get a raw LCD parallel interface. That means the LCD has a tiny connector with dozens of wires. Hobbyists are often enough scared of soldering SMD parts, they won't try to solder that .4mm pitch connector.
Then you realise that even for 800x600 @ 60Hz you need a pixel clock of around 36 MHz, so you probably need a hardware controller, you can't really get away with DMA and/or bit banging. Since you have an external controller, you can't do any of the memory efficient drawing like Nintendo NES or sifteo[0], so you'll need external buffer memory, probably at least 2 MB to fit two (16 bit colour) frames for double buffering.
As the resolution grows, pixel clock frequency and memory size requirements grow quite quickly. Soon enough you get limited by the bandwidth between your MCU and controller, by limitations of parallel interfaces and have to switch to LVDS and so on.
Most of these issues become much less relevant if a (even small) company wants to design, manufacture and sell something like this. But I'm not sure there's a demand. For most projects a small screen (with a controller chip and available for cheap because it was designed and manufactured at scale for older phones) works well enough (and you can get away with using a wimpy 8 bit MCU). If you need a larger screen, it's probably cheaper to get a low cost single board computer and a computer monitor. Economies of scale and all that.
[0] https://www.adafruit.com/blog/2012/12/05/how-we-built-a-supe...
That's something I wondered, taking a smartphone screen, but it seem pretty daunting, indeed. Such a shame in a way.
Once you get larger than 640x480, it becomes impractical to have the framebuffer in SRAM. DRAM is the obvious choice, but increases system cost and complexity sharply and so you first see it on "application processors", e.g. Cortex-A7 and up.
Also, DRAM PCB routing is very complex, and the connection from the display controller / system-on-chip to display is also critical.
I was looking to make an EVF[1] for my DSLR a while ago for example.
For example, relatively recently there was a post on HN about RaspberryPi-based DIY tablet. It had this link for LCD panel: http://www.chalk-elec.com/?page_id=1280#!/~/product/category.... The store page now says it's discontinued, though, but this was meant just as an example and I'm too lazy to search for a better offers, sorry. :)
Although, those are probably of no use with AVR microcontrollers directly, without a display controller like http://blog.tkjelectronics.dk/2012/10/lvds-display-controlle... or http://hackaday.com/2009/12/12/fpga-driver-for-psp-screen/. Phone LCDs just have it already and panels don't.
just paid $98 for a noteII screen and digitizer combo. its full hd i think.
so, stop sugar coating. lcd and digitizers are cheap. this is either low volume hobbyist market or pure greedy.
and looking at how other things are priced in those sites, like a small roll of wire for $20, id bet it is greedy.
Mikroelectronika have some interesting displays but they're all little.
Aside from the fact that's for an arduino, which probably mean very low power available, does anybody knows why all those hobbyist LCD are so low in term of resolution?
It seem impossible to find something higher than VGA on mouser or even Alibaba, much less a reasonably priced HD screen. Where are all those glorious smartphone screen?
(I'm talking about small screen, but even larger one are not that much better)