Video:What Is a LCD TV?

Transcript:What Is a LCD TV?

Hi, My name is Bob Murphy, I am the branch manager at Listen Up in Boulder, Colorado.  I am here for About.com and today we are going to be talking about what is an LCD TV.

LCD TVs Have a High Pixel Density

LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display. It's a technology that we have had around for years, we have had them in watches, and lap tops, and calculators. In the beginning they were not able to get the pixel density good enough to look like the old fashioned TV, the big fat tube TVs that we had in the past, but with more sophisticated manufacturing techniques, they were able to get the pixel density and the accuracy where there are virtually no pixels out.

LCD is Used in Flat Panel TV Designs

What we found is LCD has kind of taken over because the flat panel design allows you to put it on the wall, stick it on your desk top and not take up a lot of space. You can put it in places you couldn't fit it before. We are putting televisions on top of fireplaces, for instance. You wouldn't put a CRT tube on top of a fireplace.

LCD has kind of taken over because it's manufacturing efficiencies make it just a more desirable form. It is actually a sandwich construction. The liquid crystals are in the middle, and on the backside you have a light, you have prisms, you have optics that make it go through at the right angle, and on the outside you have a durable layer that protects all the insides from what is going on.

How the LCD Picture is Formed

Like all tv technologies, the picture is painted in kind of a scanning process, where it starts at the top and moves to the bottom, and it happens fast enough that we don't recognize it, and that's what is happening. We see it as a seamless picture. This process is done at a 60th of a second, which is fast enough for a still frame, but in the LCD world there is a little bit of a lag, or blur that happens, and so when you are watching something with motion like sports, you are actually going to see a little blur in the picture.

LCD has responded to that by going to 120th, and 240th of a second and inserting black frames in between the frames of the picture. Again, that happens so fast that you don't notice it. But it gives you a cleaner, more seamless picture, so it looks like real motion, instead of a blur.

They are several generations into the Liquid Crystal Display TV kind of generations. The picture quality is as good as the CRTs, yet has all the advantages of a flat panel. It's thinner, it's lighter, it uses less energy, there is lots more that you can do with it.

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