HitsGarden

Unlike typical cathode ray displays that produce images on a screen by bombarding electrons into a layer of phosphorous, liquid crystal displays can’t actually produce their light while functioning. This is because the pixels on an LCD are basically like little shutters that vary their opacity accordingly to the amount of electric current they receive.

This disadvantage is especially visible in the case of old-fashioned monochrome liquid crystal displays, which can be read only when they are lit with light coming from the environment, and become totally useless in the absence of it. In this case, light coming from the Sun or reflected by the environment enters the LCD, passes through all the layers of the display before encountering a reflective surface that sends the light back to the viewer. Read the rest of this entry »

Congrats to Sharp for producing what is claimed to be the world’s thinnest liquid crystal display. Most of us are blissfully unaware that there’s a right old battle going on in the world of LCD panel manufacturing, to see who can make the thinnest screens, and until last week that honour belonged to AU Optronics, with a screen just 0.69mm thick. But now Sharp have taken back the lead with a 2.2–inch panel that measures, wait for it, only 0.68mm. Now this is clearly a big deal for those involved and probably came about as a result of all sorts of clever technical developments but it’s unlikely that 0.01mm is going to make a lot of difference to the rest of us, but it’s nice to know it can be done…