Seven inch is the right answer for most projects. It is comfortable to watch across a desk, it fits a box you can still ship affordably, and it sits in the middle of the price range.
But that is the answer to the average project, and yours might not be average. A 2.4 inch screen inside a small jewelry box does something a 7 inch screen cannot. A 10 inch screen in front of a buyer at a meeting does something a 7 inch screen cannot either.
So this article does the thing nobody does. It gives you the actual physical dimensions of each screen, the smallest box each one can live in, the resolution you should export your video at, how much battery each one burns, and what each costs. Then it tells you how to pick.
The short version
- Seven inch is the default. It films well, reads across a desk, ships as a normal parcel and sits mid range at $60 to $78 a unit.
- Screen size scales by area, not by inches. A 10.1 inch panel covers about fifteen times the area of a 2.4 inch panel, and it often carries the same 1024 x 600 pixels, so bigger is not sharper.
- The screen decides the lid, the lid decides the box, and the box decides the freight. A 10.1 inch screen forces a 13 x 8.5 inch box that couriers bill on volume.
- Battery runs from 5 to 6 hours on a 2.4 inch module down to 2.5 to 3.5 hours on 10.1 inch. Only retail displays and sales samples ever notice; specify a push button for those.
- Confirm the module footprint against the datasheet before the dieline is cut. Two suppliers’ 7 inch modules can differ by 8 mm.
The five sizes at a glance
Every number in this table is explained further down. This is the summary.
| Screen | Active area | Common resolution | Smallest sensible box | Typical unit cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 49 x 37 mm | 320 x 240 | 4 x 3 x 1.5 in | $35 to $45 |
| 4.3 inch | 95 x 54 mm | 480 x 272 | 6.5 x 4.5 x 2 in | $42 to $55 |
| 5 inch | 111 x 62 mm | 800 x 480 | 7 x 5 x 2 in | $50 to $65 |
| 7 inch | 155 x 87 mm | 1024 x 600 | 9.5 x 6.5 x 2.5 in | $60 to $78 |
| 10.1 inch | 223 x 126 mm | 1024 x 600 or 1280 x 800 | 13 x 8.5 x 3 in | $75 to $90 |
Two things to notice before we go further.
The active area grows much faster than the diagonal suggests. A 10 inch screen is four times the diagonal of a 2.4 inch screen but it covers about fifteen times the area. Screen size scales by area, not by inches.
And resolution does not scale with size. A 7 inch and a 10.1 inch panel often carry the same 1024 x 600 pixels. The bigger screen is not sharper. It is just bigger, which means the same pixels are spread over more space.
What each screen actually measures
Screen sizes are quoted as a diagonal, which is useless when you are drawing a dieline. Here is the same set converted into the numbers you can actually design with.
| Screen | Diagonal | Aspect | Active width | Active height | Typical module footprint |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 61 mm | 4:3 | 48.8 mm | 36.6 mm | About 62 x 48 mm |
| 4.3 inch | 109 mm | 16:9 | 95.2 mm | 53.5 mm | About 112 x 70 mm |
| 5 inch | 127 mm | 16:9 | 110.7 mm | 62.3 mm | About 128 x 78 mm |
| 7 inch | 178 mm | 16:9 | 154.9 mm | 87.2 mm | About 172 x 104 mm |
| 10.1 inch | 257 mm | 16:9 | 223.5 mm | 125.8 mm | About 242 x 145 mm |
The module footprint is the part that matters structurally. It is the screen plus its bezel plus the board behind it, and it is what has to fit inside the lid.
Module footprints vary between suppliers by a few millimeters. Confirm the exact figure against the datasheet for the specific module before your dieline is cut. That single check prevents the most expensive mistake in this format.
The box size each screen forces
This is the part most people work out too late. The screen decides the minimum box, and the minimum box decides the shipping cost.
The lid has to hold the module plus a margin of board around it. That margin is not decoration. It is where the lid gets its rigidity and where the wrap folds over.
| Screen | Minimum lid inner size | Realistic outer box | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 92 x 78 mm | 4 x 3 x 1.5 in | Fits jewelry and small accessory boxes |
| 4.3 inch | 142 x 100 mm | 6.5 x 4.5 x 2 in | The smallest size that still feels like video |
| 5 inch | 158 x 108 mm | 7 x 5 x 2 in | Good balance for cosmetics and small electronics |
| 7 inch | 202 x 134 mm | 9.5 x 6.5 x 2.5 in | The default. Suits most product launches |
| 10.1 inch | 272 x 175 mm | 13 x 8.5 x 3 in | Presentation piece. Ships as freight, not as a parcel |
That last row deserves a warning. A 10 inch video box is a large object. Once you add an outer shipper it becomes a parcel that couriers bill on volume rather than weight, and the shipping line in your budget can approach the cost of the box itself.
If your product is small and you specify a 10 inch screen, you end up with a mostly empty box that costs a lot to move. That is a real scenario and it happens more than it should.
Resolution, and what to export
Send the highest quality master you have. The factory scales it to the panel. But it helps enormously to know what it is being scaled to.
| Screen | Native resolution | Export at | Pixel density |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 320 x 240 | 640 x 480 | About 167 ppi |
| 4.3 inch | 480 x 272 | 1280 x 720 | About 128 ppi |
| 5 inch | 800 x 480 | 1280 x 720 | About 186 ppi |
| 7 inch | 1024 x 600 | 1920 x 1080 | About 170 ppi |
| 10.1 inch | 1024 x 600 or 1280 x 800 | 1920 x 1080 | About 119 to 149 ppi |
Here is the practical consequence. Small text disappears. On a 4.3 inch panel at 480 x 272, a line of text that reads fine on your laptop becomes an unreadable smear.
The rule I give people is simple. Any text on screen should be at least one twelfth of the screen height. On a 4.3 inch panel that means roughly 22 pixels tall, which is much larger than most designers instinctively use.
Test it properly. Export a still frame, scale it down to the panel’s native resolution, then scale it back up and look at it. If the text is soft at that point, it will be soft on the box.
How far away will it be watched?
Screen size is really a question about distance, and distance is decided by the situation, not by you.
| Situation | Typical distance | Comfortable minimum |
|---|---|---|
| Held in the hands | 12 to 16 in | 2.4 or 4.3 inch |
| Open on a desk, one viewer | 20 to 28 in | 5 or 7 inch |
| Across a table, two viewers | 30 to 40 in | 7 inch |
| Shown to a small group | 40 to 60 in | 10.1 inch |
| Being filmed for content | Camera at 12 to 24 in | 5 inch or larger |
The last row is worth pausing on. If your box is going to influencers, the screen will be filmed, not watched. A camera pointed at a 2.4 inch screen produces a small bright rectangle in the middle of the frame. A 7 inch screen fills enough of the shot to be the shot.
That single consideration has moved more of my clients from 5 inch to 7 inch than any other argument.
Battery, playback, and what a bigger screen really costs you
A larger panel draws more power. That is the physics and there is no way around it.
| Screen | Typical total playback per charge | Approximate opens before recharge |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 5 to 6 hours | 300+ at 60 seconds |
| 4.3 inch | 4 to 5 hours | 250+ at 60 seconds |
| 5 inch | 4 hours | 200+ at 60 seconds |
| 7 inch | 3.5 to 4 hours | 180+ at 60 seconds |
| 10.1 inch | 2.5 to 3.5 hours | 130+ at 60 seconds |
For a press kit or a gift box, none of this matters. The box is opened once, maybe five times if it gets passed around an office.
It matters enormously for two other uses. A retail display box that plays all day will need charging. A sales sample that a rep carries for months of meetings will need charging too, and the rep will forget.
For those two cases, specify a push button rather than a reed switch. A reed switch plays every time the lid moves. On a sample that lives in a bag, that is a flat battery by Thursday.
Boxes arrive partly charged from the factory. If your kits are going to sit in a warehouse for six weeks before they ship, budget an hour of somebody’s time to top them up before the send.
Memory and how long your video can be
Memory rarely limits anyone, but the numbers are worth knowing because they change with screen size.
A bigger panel needs a higher bitrate to look clean, so the same gigabyte carries less video.
| Screen | Minutes per GB, approximately | Common memory fitted |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 28 to 34 min | 128 MB to 1 GB |
| 4.3 inch | 22 to 26 min | 512 MB to 2 GB |
| 5 inch | 18 to 22 min | 1 to 4 GB |
| 7 inch | 14 to 18 min | 1 to 8 GB |
| 10.1 inch | 12 to 16 min | 2 to 8 GB |
Even the tightest combination on that table gives you around twelve minutes. Your video should be between 30 and 90 seconds, which I have argued at length in how long should a packaging video be.
So memory is never the constraint. Specify enough to hold your file with room to reload a longer one later and move on.
There is one case where memory matters. If you plan to load several videos onto one module and let the recipient choose with buttons, you need capacity for all of them. Ask for that configuration explicitly, because the default build plays one file.
Weight, and why it changes your freight bill
Modules are not heavy but they are not nothing, and there is a regulation attached.
| Screen | Approximate module weight | Approximate battery net weight |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 25 to 35 g | 6 to 10 g |
| 4.3 inch | 45 to 60 g | 10 to 14 g |
| 5 inch | 60 to 80 g | 12 to 18 g |
| 7 inch | 100 to 130 g | 18 to 25 g |
| 10.1 inch | 200 to 250 g | 30 to 40 g |
That last column is the one your freight forwarder cares about. Air shipments of lithium batteries under Section II are capped at 5 kg net of batteries per package.
Divide it out and you get a number nobody publishes. At 25 g of battery per unit, that is 200 units per carton. At 40 g it is 125 units per carton.
If you are shipping 400 video boxes by air, that is three or four cartons minimum regardless of how much space you have. The full explanation of why, and what paperwork travels with them, is in how to ship a product with a lithium battery inside. The limits themselves come from the IATA lithium battery guidance.
What each size costs, and where the money goes
Screen size is the single largest driver of unit cost in a custom video box.
| Screen | Unit cost at 100 | Unit cost at 500 | What drives the difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | $38 to $45 | $35 to $40 | Panel cost, small box |
| 4.3 inch | $46 to $55 | $42 to $49 | Panel cost |
| 5 inch | $54 to $65 | $50 to $58 | Panel plus larger board area |
| 7 inch | $64 to $78 | $60 to $70 | Panel, larger box, more print area |
| 10.1 inch | $80 to $90 | $75 to $84 | Panel, much larger box, freight |
Notice the drop from 100 to 500 is smaller than it would be on a printed box. That is because the module is a bought component and its price does not fall much with quantity. Tooling and printing scale. Electronics do not.
Which leads to a useful conclusion. If you are torn between 300 units of a 7 inch box and 500 units of a 5 inch box, the totals are close. Choose on the audience, not on the arithmetic.
Not sure which screen your product needs?
Send the product dimensions and a note on where the box gets opened. We’ll reply with the screen size we’d specify and the box it forces.
Choosing by what is on the screen
The content decides the size more reliably than the budget does.
A person talking to camera. A face reads at almost any size, because we are extremely good at reading faces. 4.3 or 5 inch is enough. Frame it as a medium close up and it works.
A product demonstration. The viewer has to see what the hands are doing. Go to 7 inch. Below that, detail gets lost and the demonstration stops demonstrating anything.
Text and data on screen. Go to 7 inch minimum, and 10 inch if there are numbers that matter. Anything below 5 inch turns a chart into a shape.
Fast cut brand film. Motion reads at small sizes better than detail does. 5 inch handles this well.
Something with fine texture. Fabric, jewelry, finish, grain. 7 inch minimum, and light the footage hard. Small panels crush shadow detail and fine texture is mostly shadow detail.
A personal message to one named person. 2.4 or 4.3 inch, inside a small box. Intimacy is the point and a big screen works against it.
Choosing by where the box gets opened
Same question from the other direction.
| Where | Recommended | Why |
|---|---|---|
| At a desk, alone | 5 or 7 inch | Close viewing, undivided attention |
| In a meeting, shown to others | 10.1 inch | Has to read across a table |
| On camera, unboxing content | 7 inch | Fills enough of the frame to matter |
| At a trade show, standing | 7 or 10.1 inch | Noise, distance, and glancing attention |
| Carried by a sales rep | 7 inch, push button | Balance of presence and battery life |
| Inside a small luxury gift | 2.4 or 4.3 inch | The box is small and it should stay small |
Aspect ratio and the file you send
Four of the five sizes are 16:9. The 2.4 inch panel is usually 4:3.
That matters if you specify a 2.4 inch screen and hand over a 16:9 video. You will get black bars top and bottom, and on a screen that small the bars eat a serious share of an already small picture.
If you are using a 2.4 inch panel, frame for 4:3 from the start. If the video already exists in 16:9, crop rather than letterbox, and check that nothing important sits at the left and right edges.
For the other sizes, standard 16:9 is what you want. Send MP4 at the highest quality you have, keep the frame rate at 25 or 30, and avoid heavy grain because compression at these bitrates handles grain badly.
One more thing. Check the first frame of your file. Some modules display the first frame as a still while the video loads. If your first frame is black, the box appears to do nothing for a moment, and that moment is the one you paid for.
Vertical screens and other configurations
Almost every video box is horizontal, because lids are wider than they are deep and 16:9 fits that shape naturally.
Vertical is possible. The panel is simply mounted rotated and the video authored at 9:16. It suits tall narrow products and it suits content shot for social, which is increasingly the content brands already have.
Two cautions. A vertical 7 inch panel needs a lid that is 155 mm deep, which makes for an unusual box shape. And a vertical panel in a horizontal lid wastes most of the lid area.
If you want vertical, design the box around it from the beginning rather than trying to fit it into a standard structure.
The mistakes that cost the most
Choosing the screen before the product is measured. The product decides the box floor. The screen decides the box lid. If those two disagree, one of them has to change and it is usually the expensive one.
Not confirming the module footprint against the actual datasheet. Two suppliers’ 7 inch modules can differ by 8 mm. A dieline cut for the wrong one does not fit.
Assuming a bigger screen is a sharper screen. A 10.1 inch panel at 1024 x 600 has fewer pixels per inch than a 7 inch panel at the same resolution. Bigger, not better.
Putting small text on a small panel. The single most common video mistake in this format.
Specifying a reed switch on a box that will be handled repeatedly. The lid moves, the video plays, the battery drains.
Ordering a 10 inch box for a product that fits in your palm. You pay for the box, then you pay again to ship the air inside it.
Forgetting that magnets and reed switches interact. If you want a magnetic closure and a magnetic trigger, their positions have to be worked out at dieline stage. Discovering the conflict at first sample is expensive and it happens regularly.
Related reading
Video box cost breakdown shows exactly how much of the unit price the panel accounts for.
How long should a packaging video be covers the text sizing rule and the length that suits each panel.
How to ship a product with a lithium battery inside explains the 5 kg battery limit that turns module weight into carton count.
Matching the screen to the box you can actually ship
One more constraint that decides more projects than any of the above.
Couriers bill on dimensional weight when volume exceeds actual weight. A video box is light for its size, so it is almost always billed on volume rather than on the scale.
That turns screen size into a shipping decision. Here is roughly what each size does to a parcel once an outer shipper is added.
| Screen | Outer shipper, approximate | Effect on a domestic parcel |
|---|---|---|
| 2.4 inch | 6 x 5 x 3 in | Smallest bracket, cheapest to send |
| 4.3 inch | 8 x 6 x 3.5 in | Still comfortably in a standard bracket |
| 5 inch | 9 x 7 x 3.5 in | Standard bracket |
| 7 inch | 11.5 x 8.5 x 4 in | Upper end of standard, worth checking |
| 10.1 inch | 15 x 10.5 x 5 in | Frequently pushes into the next bracket |
The jump from 7 inch to 10.1 inch is the one to watch. On a 200 unit send it can add several hundred dollars in freight for a screen the recipient will not obviously appreciate more.
A useful test. Before you settle on the screen, draw the outer carton and check it against your courier’s bracket table. If it lands one inch inside the next bracket, either shrink the box or accept the cost knowingly. Discovering it after production is the expensive version of the same conversation.
There is a second consequence. A bigger outer carton means fewer units per master carton, which means more cartons on the freight from the factory. That compounds with the 5 kg battery limit per package on air shipments, and the two together can double your carton count on a large send.
The shortcut, if you want one
Measure the product. If it fits comfortably in a box of about 9.5 by 6.5 inches, specify a 7 inch screen and stop thinking about it. That combination covers most projects, films well, ships as a normal parcel, and sits in the middle of the price range.
Go smaller only when the box genuinely has to be small. Go larger only when the screen has to be read from across a table.
Before you specify the screen
Work through this in order and the rest of the project gets easier.
- Measure the product. Length, width, height, weight.
- Decide where the box gets opened and how far the viewer will be.
- Decide what is on screen. Face, demo, text, or texture.
- Pick the screen size from those three answers, not from the price list.
- Confirm the exact module footprint against the datasheet.
- Check the lid can hold it with margin left over.
- Check the resulting outer box against your courier’s dimensional brackets.
- Choose the trigger. Reed switch for a single opening, push button for repeated use.
- Check for magnet conflict if you also want a magnetic closure.
- Author the video at the right aspect ratio with text sized for the panel.
Send us the product dimensions, the quantity, the destination, and a note on where these boxes get opened. We will come back with the screen size we would specify, a dieline built around the actual module, a 3D mock up, and a firm price.
Get a dieline built around the real module
Product dimensions and weight, quantity, destination and where these boxes get opened. We reply with the screen size, a dieline, a 3D mock up and a firm price.
