General Trends in Display Applications

Liquid crystal displays (LCDs) have many advantages over other display types. They are flat and compact, possess extremely low-power consumption (microwatts per square centimeter in the case of the twisted nematic effect), their color and contrast does not fade with an increase in the illumination intensity, they work both in transmissive and reflective modes in a wide operating temperature range and with a long lifetime. Besides that, LCDs are the most economically produced flat display systems. LCDs have 

TABLE 8.6. Guest-host effect large area information board [11]. 

Large board displays could also be made using Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystal Films (PDLC) [12]. 

According to the information of Roche (Switzerland), watches and calculators with liquid crystal displays occupy 73% of the total LCD market [13]. Among other applications they distinguish displays for measuring tools, ofiice equipment, clocks, cameras, telephones and thermometers, car dashboards, games, consumer products, avionics, etc. Since 1987, we are facing an exponential growth in production of matrix and supertwisted displays for portable TVs, personal computers, video TV sets, projection systems, etc. 

According to estimations [14, 15, 16] to the end of this century the overall production cost of LCDs will come close to that of CRTs and even exceed the latter (and will considerably exceed that for their nearest competitors vacuum fluorescent displays (VFD), plasma displays (PD), and electroluminiscent displays (ED) (Fig. 8.4). 

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