How to drive a plain LCD panel (get it to work with DVI)

I'm not that much familiar with Arduino, but let's look at it from the LCD perspective.

Virtually all popular character LCDs use HD44780 controller these days (that's what LiquidCrystal library supports). This controller doesn't support UTF-8 directly, each character is represented by a single byte.

Thus you need to convert UTF-8 to 8-bit characters manually. The controller has a built-in character generator with 208 5x8 and 32 5x10 characters, plus up to 8 user-defined characters (see createChar). You need to map every input character to one of the predefined/custom characters - obviously you can only display a subset of UTF8 characters, you need to decide which characters you want/can to display.

The conversion itself should be pretty straightforward - you just need to iterate over the UTF8 string, mapping every character to a single byte. Most likely you'll want to use a lookup tables to keep it simple. Let me know if this needs further explanation.

I also measured the power consumption of my LCD monitors with a power meter at zero brightness. Dynamic contrast is off and to be honest, it's totally pesky so it is allways off anyway. After some hours I checked my measurements with the meter.

Results:

My monitors consumes more power when displaying full white!

Dell P2414H monitor - AH-IPS panel with LED backlight measured at zero brightness

• total white 10.0 Watt

• total black 8.5 Watt

Fujitsu Siemens P20-2 monitor - S-PVA panel with CCFL backlight measured at zero brightness

• total white 30.0 Watt
• total black 28.0 Watt

You may think that I mixed up measurement results, but it is not ! I dare everybody to measure his/her monitor and post results !

The claim that every LCD/TFT monitor consumes less with total white is untrue.

I cannot measure monitor with TN panel as yet because I haven't got. I will measure a TN monitor at my workplace and will post results.

Added info:

Fujitsu Siemens P20-2 monitor measured again with strobe effect youtube video:

When playing Youtube video "Black and White Strobe Light" full screen the consumption is 28.5 Watt average at zero brightness. The backlight have way more impact on power consumption. This monitor consumes 45 Watts (when display black) and 48 Watts (when display white) at 100% brightness. Full screen strobe 46.5 Watts.