Friday, February 20 2004
Mitsubishi Electric is showing off a new LCD that can be viewed from both sides. The display, which the company says is a world first, was developed initially for use in clamshell-type cellular-telephone handsets and could help make such telephones thinner and lighter.
Mitsubishi Electric's new display incorporates a conventional LCD panel with newly designed backlights constructed in a three-layer sandwich--the display sits at the center and the backlights are on the outer edges. The new backlights are transparent and so enable the single LCD panel at the center to be seen from both sides even though it is in the center of the sandwich. For viewing from the right, for example, the left-hand backlight transmits light through the panel and on through the right-hand backlight to the viewer.
Mitsubishi Electric has developed two variations of the reversible LCD and both were demonstrated Tuesday at the company's research and development center in western Japan.
The first version allows a single image to be viewed from both sides of the same panel. The image isn't adjusted depending on the viewing direction, so from one side text appears correctly and from the other side it appears reversed. A second type gets over this problem by rapidly changing the image on the display in synchronization with each backlight 120 times per second so that the same image, correctly displayed, is projected in each direction 60 times per second.
The display has three modes: front view, rear view, and simultaneous view from both sides.
Source:
http://www.pcworld.com
