>     [palmtop, organizer, and graphing calculator LCD displays.]
>
>     [1] The displays are often custom-made for the organizers in question;
>
>     [2] Most pocket organizers have the display drivers built into the main
>      CPU chip; even if the larger displays need additional driver chips, some
>      of the driver pins (not just the video generation logic) are on board
>      the MCU.  Consequently, there's no "saleable unit" whith drivers
>      on-board, so a user would have nothing but the bare glass to work with.
>
> I don't buy it.  I've seen equally custom and useless items for sale.
> (Heck, I've bought some.  Anyone know something useful I can do with those
> 0.7inch AM Color LCD TV screens that hit six months ago?)  For that matter,
> there's no end of "odd and probably unuseful" VGA resolution laptop
> displays out there with little documentation...

The "odd but probably useful" VGA laptop displays can, in many cases, be
put to use with a little bit of research.  After all, there aren't all that
many companies making driver chips and it's often not too hard to figure
out what's going on.  It's often not worth it (vs buying a better-documented
display) but certainly possible.  On the other hand, you're talking about a
device that's $100's new selling surplus for $20 or so.

The organizer bare glass, on the other hand, is probably expensive enough
that the organizer manufacturers aren't going to order up many more than
they need for their production run; since organizers aren't exactly a "hit"
item, there isn't any real need to advance-order subcomponents.

The only common cases where I've seen consumer-product subassemblies for
surplus sale are those where a product's sales don't live up to anticipated
demand and so production of partially-produced units gets abandoned midstream.
After all, even if you've spent $30 building parts and subassemblies for a
unit whose finished cost is $50, it doesn't make sense to spend the other $20
if nobody wants to buy the unit anyway.  Better to salvage what you can out
of that $30.

Further, while the organizer glass is expensive enough that it's not going
to be ordered in excess quantities, it's probably not worth enough for sur-
plus cases to carry it.  Realistically speaking, who would want to spend
more than a couple bucks for such a thing, recognizing the amount of effort
required to get it working?  Even getting driver chips in onesy-twoosies
will be hard and piece price for drivers alone may exceed the price of a
display with drivers built in.

Personally, I think it would be neat if it were easier to get segment-style
displays with custom multiplex arrangements.  Unfortunately, from what I
understand that's only possible if you're getting boatloads; for anything
that standard segment/mux arrangements won't accommodate you pretty much
have to go with an alphanumeric display.

On a somewhat-related note, I find it surprising that nearly all of the
LCD displays you can get have drivers featuring lots of useless (to most
applications) Japanese characters.  It would seem there would be many
more useful things to put in those characters (some possibilities: small
caps; bold-face uppercase letters and numerals; dot-cluster characters;
etc.)  Anyone know of any other character sets?