Liquid-crystal Display and Other Technical Terms Associated with Display Devices
Whether it’s for your desktop computer, your tv or the latest-generation digital photo frames, display devices are integral to our day to day lives. Yet, how much do we know about it? It’s no problem as long as the display shows nice colours and does its job efficiently, is it?
While the above notion may work for most people, it does turn into an issue while shopping for it. Finding no reasons behind the different prices of a similar-looking liquid-crystal display may seem mind-boggling at times, but there are reasons. Anyways, let’s find out what it means by technical terms such as liquid-crystal display, thin-film transistor, and more from below.
Thin-film Transistor (TFT)
Thin-film Transistor (TFT) is not a type of display. It’s rather a metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), which primarily finds its use in LCDs. The semiconductor is made using thin films of an active semiconductor layer and a supporting substrate like glass.
Liquid-Crystal Display (LCD)
A particular type of flat display, a liquid-crystal display is also often abbreviated as LCD. It uses light-modulating properties of liquid crystals in combination with polarizers to display arbitrary images or fixed images.
Sleek, slim, and flat, LCDs have found a wide array of applications including television screens, smartphones, computer monitors, and so on. They have pretty much replaced the old-fashioned and bulky CRT monitors. Most colour liquid-crystal displays use a similar thin-film transistor (TFT) array and other similar techniques.
Light Emitting Diode (LED) Displays
A more advanced version of the efficient and colour accurate display is the light-emitting diode (LED) displays. Contrary to LCDs, these displays don’t utilize any thin-film transistor. Instead, LEDs rely on an array of light-emitting diodes as pixels for video screens.
These displays are brighter, which is particularly beneficial under the sunlight. Similar to liquid-crystal displays, it has a wide range of applications including replacing LCDs as display devices in many gadgets.