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It’s been pretty easy to snag a touchscreen display that you can slap in a 9 or 10 inch netbook for the past few years, thanks to eBay. But these touch panels have tended to be inexpensive resistive touchscreens, requiring a stylus or fingertip for input and typically recognizing only one input at a time.

Now the folks at Netbook News have found an eBay seller that is shipping 8.9 inch and 10.1 inch capacitive multitouch display. The seller claims that they designed to work with a number of netbooks, including pretty much any netbook from Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, or other companies. Of course, there are some older netbooks out there with 10.2 inch displays, so the 10.1 inch touch panel might not be a perfect fit for those models.

The touchscreens recognize up to two fingers at a time. Clearly, they’re not state of the art, as there are other touch panels which recognize up to 10 different inputs. But the price is right. You can pick up the 10.1 inch touch panel for $99.99, while the 8.9 inch model sells for $89.99. Shipping is kind of steep at $16, but that’s likely because the product is coming from Hong Kong.

You’ll need a bit of technical know-how to install the screens, as they do require some soldering.

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4 replies on “Capacitive multitouch netbook touchscreens going for under $100 on eBay”

  1. I’m still looking for one that fits a 12″ netbook (specifically Dell Mini 12)

  2. Interesting… do we know which chipset they’re using? That would determine whether they can use the multitouch support baked into the Linux kernel (and supported at higher levels by, say, Maverick Ubuntu)

  3. To be clear, much in the same way there’s a difference between the term “tablet” and “slate”, there’s a propriety when talking about touchscreen displays.

    A touchscreen display is the display screen, typically an LCD panel, and an overlay panel that provides the passive (such as capacitive or resistive), active (such as those made by Wacom), or hybrid digitizer. This is one of those points of confusion that makes me cringe whenever people ask if the Pixel Qi “is multitouch”. That’s not how it works. The touch panel is in (almost) every case an OVERLAY. It’s not the display, and it’s not the screen.

    If you’re going to order a product like this, you should want to know if you’re getting an entirely new touchscreen display (e.g. a new LCD too) or just the overlay (these look like overlays to me). Also, while I am always grateful when somebody learns a portion of my language in order to communicate with me when I am totally ignorant of theirs, I cringe at statements like: “We are accept Paypal only.” I’ll assume that it’s just a typo, which I am also prone to making.

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