Jonsbo DS8 impressions

I got a tip about this mini 8 inch display, it was cheap enough (50€-ish) to just try if I could find uses for it.

On arrival it looked quite good. Sure, the "stand" is just two hexagonal risers that connect poorly to the holes, but otherwise the physical appearance is good.

The display is intended to live together with a specific kind of PC case, the idea is to show system monitoring and temperature levels in a grand way. This also means it has no rounded corners or other faux ergonomic details, and I really like that.

Well, it's better than having not thought this at all

There's some space behind the panel, and it might fit a small Pi or something, but the cable connectors are there anyway and the cables will take most of that space.

Connection with the miniHDMI to HDMI posed no problem and the device showed as a second display on Linux Mint with no problems. The same goes with the Apple Mac from 2019.

The viewing angles are good, surely it is best viewed from straight on but there's no nasty colour distortion when viewed from an angle.

The backside, the connectors are at the middle.

The 1280x800 resolution is actually 800x1280 according to xrandr, no surprise as the desktop was in vertical orientation when initially connected. There are no other resolutions available. 800 is already a lot more than 720, so many app windows fit quite fine.

Using ddcutil shows "Invalid display" and "DDC communication failed", so there's no hope in getting more information through that route. It does say it's manufactured in 2022, week 43 (if this data is true, that is).

Only three buttons for brightness and shutting the backlight, there's no menu.

The refresh rate is 60hz, and as the display likely does not adapt to 50hz I have little hope of using it in any proper retro/emulation context.

But there's a bunch of gear that could work with 60hz. How about them?

Retro Games' The Spectrum: Black screen. I did a factory reset on The Spectrum and tried again, no effect. Did a factory reset, explicitly chose 60hz, after which I reconnected to the 8 inch display. I can only refer to Nope N. Nopester, it did not work.

Likewise with Retro Games' Amiga Mini, no luck. There's a pattern here so I'm not going to dig up The C64 just to see it not working on this display.

I can run an emulator on the second screen...

The Raspberry Pi 400 has a micro-HDMI connector, and I don't have the adapters to connect it to this display, which has mini-HDMI.

A conventional Raspberry Pi did not produce an image straightaway. There's so many ways to configure a Raspberry, so I don't think this is the definitive outcome. A topic for the future.

Last and the least, Samsung Dex. I stick the USB-C to HDMI adapter in, the phone says Dex is enabled, but nothing is shown on the display. All right.

So, it appears that without deeper tinkering I've only been able to connect the Jonsbo DS8 to a normal desktop computer. I didn't expect this display to be highly versatile, but I have to say it's a little disappointing.

Still, it may prove to be useful as a 2nd display, or as a temporary display for the loose computers I have around.

...or Steam games at 1280x800, 60hz