Here's a mystery: liquid-crystal displays (LCDs) dominate just about every information-display application worldwide these days. Yet, to paraphrase Winston Churchill's famous quote about democracy, LCDs are the worst form of display technology except for all the others that have been tried. Consider the following: It is a fussy technology that requires a complex switching backplane. It is not a solid-state solution; it actually requires that some components physically change their location and orientation in order to work. And it is dreadfully inefficient in that a typical active-matrix LCD consumes 95% or more of the transmitted light, even when it's showing a pure-white image. As a result, you have to use very bright backlights, which, in turn, require complex light recovery and management components to make efficient use of this energy.
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