Official Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 now available with upgraded resolution

The original "Official" Raspberry Pi Touch Screen Display was seen as a pretty low resolution device even 9 years ago, but with support for the Raspberry Pi DSI connector, the ability to be powered from the GPIO pins and baked in support on Raspberry Pi OS, it's no surprise that it was a very popular addition to the Pi's official accessory list.

Ebon Upton, founder of Raspberry Pi Trading, posted today that the Official Touch Screen 2 has launched. The new unit offers a built touch screen controller, which eliminates the external ribbon and daughter board of the old model, also reducing the overall thickness.

The Display 2 offers an upgraded resolution of 1280x720, pretty low by modern standards, but nevertheless a significant upgrade over the outgoing model. The unit can still be powered by the GPIO pins on your Raspberry Pi of choice and includes multi-touch, albeit reduced from 10 to 5 fingers. Unlike the outgoing model, the display is natively portrait, so you'll need to use screen rotation in your OS of choice to get it to display in landscape.

The Pi can be mounted to the back of the device, just like the previous model, and it supports all Raspberry Pi models with a DSI connector. The package includes ribbon cables for both the reduced size DSI on the Pi 5 and the full size DSI connector on the Pi 4 and earlier. The mounting holes for the new model are not the same as the old one, therefore direct drop-in replacements where projects have used the old mounting holes will not be possible without some modification.

The Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 has yet to hit Amazon, with only the old version being available at the time of writing, but the new model can be purchased from resellers such as Pimoroni and Sparkfun for the same price of $60.