cool things to do with lcd displays for sale

Unused electronics are the bane of the modern life. Perfectly functional gadgets sit quietly in a corner of the store room, doing nothing. If you"re wondering what to do with old computer monitors, here are a few easy ideas to repurpose unused screens.

In this guide, it doesn"t matter if your old monitor is still working or not. Even if it isn"t, you can use its parts to make a great new gadget. From turning it into a super-tiny computer or dashboard to refashioning into a smart mirror, here are some of the most productive ways to repurpose a computer monitor.

The Raspberry Pi 4 is an incredible device. While it has a wide range of uses, at its core, it is a tiny, low-cost, full-fledged computer. And that means your old monitor can be turned into a PC for less than $60.

Perhaps the best thing to do with an old flat-screen monitor is a DIY DAKboard. The DAKboard is a LCD wall display that shows the current time, weather forecast, calendar events, stock quotes, fitness data, and news headlines. It"s all displayed on a soothing photo. You could buy an official DAKboard, but the makers themselves have shown how to build your own wall display with a Raspberry Pi. when you can build one for far less money and a little geeky fun, the choice is obvious.

Attach your old monitor to a Pi and it can be put in your kitchen as a recipe and video source. Make a Pi-based retro video game console as a treat for your kid (or the kid in you).

Sometimes, you"re working on something private in an open office, or browsing certain *cough* sites *cough* at home. You can"t have your colleagues or kids see what"s on the screen. To keep snooping eyes at bay, make a "your-eyes-only" monitor from an old one.

To anyone else, it is going to look like a blank white monitor with nothing on it. But wearing a special pair of spectacles, you"ll be able to see things on it like a regular monitor. It"s magic! It"s a tough process, but dimovi"s guide at Instructables is thorough and precise.

Basically, you will be cutting out the polarizing film of the old LCD monitor. This film will then be put on a simple pair of glasses. Now your screen appears white, but the glasses can "see" the content. It"s one of the best ways to keep prying eyes out of your PC.

The reason you should use an old computer monitor is that things can go wrong. You will be disassembling and then reassembling the monitor, along with cutting out the anti-glare and polarizing films. You"ll also need to separate the polarizing film from the anti-glare one.

If you have a broken old LCD monitor, it can be re-purposed into a usable mirror; but if you have a working old LCD monitor, adding a Raspberry Pi can turn it into a smart magic mirror!

You can choose from different Raspberry Pi smart magic mirror projects, but for our money, go with the MagicMirror². It"s the original, most popular, and perhaps now the easiest way to build a smart mirror. It comes with a clock, calendar, weather forecast, and news feed.

If you"re on a tight budget for a first-time DIY project, consider the $100 smart mirror. It"s not the best version of turning an LCD monitor into a smart mirror, but you"ll get the basic features and not spend a bomb.

If you have the space available, the best thing you can do with an extra monitor is to boost your productivity with a dual-monitor setup. A second monitor has many potential purposes, such as extended screen space, a dashboard for your social media or news updates, or a dedicated video conferencing screen.

All desktop operating systems support the ability to use dual monitors. It"s pretty easy to setup dual monitors on Windows, and you can then customize how you use the two spaces. To connect two monitors, you will likely need a graphics card with multiple HDMI ports, or use an HDMI and a VGA port on desktops.

Make it a dedicated screen for Nintendo Wii:The Nintendo Wii can connect to a VGA monitor, so if you don"t have a Wii, buy one. In fact, buy a used one, they"re pretty cheap on Craigslist.

Like any gadget, monitors have a limited shelf life. If you"re looking to upgrade, you now have a few ideas of what to do with your old monitor. And that age should influence which project you chose. For example, given the effort involved in building a smart mirror, don"t go with a screen that"s already shown signs of trouble. The Raspberry Pi-based projects are usually the easiest to keep changing.

In fact, if you have an old monitor and old PC parts, you can repurpose the whole PC. You can turn it into a home security system, a home server or media center, or try other unique creative projects.

Breaking your beloved computer monitor is a tragic situation to find yourself in. While you may not be able to enjoy your PC like you used to, you don’t have to mourn the loss of your screen: you can upcycle it. But how can you turn a broken computer monitor into something new? Let’s take a look at some of the best projects from around the web to help you to achieve this goal.

While it doesn’t look like it, the pixel panel inside your monitor is semi-transparent. This makes it possible for the backlight to shine through it, in turn making it possible for images to be displayed on the screen. Of course, though, you can take advantage of the transparent nature of your broken monitor’s panel when it comes to turning it into something new.

Building your own transparent LCD screen, as in this Instructables guide, takes patience and a broken monitor with a working panel. That makes this king of project great for those with monitors that have broken speakers, backlights, or other components that aren"t needed for it.

This LCD computer side panel guide shows you how to create a transparent LCD side panel for a computer case, but there are loads of other ways to use a see-through monitor. You could attach your monitor to a fish tank, using the lights inside as the backlight (as long as it doesn’t upset the fish). Alternatively, you could also attach a monitor like this to the inside of a window to use natural light as the backlight.

LCD, LED, and other types of monitors contain semi-transparent sheets called diffusers. Diffusers spread the light created by backlights to make sure that it covers the display evenly, much like the diffuser panels used by photographers.

This project is ideal for those with monitors that don’t work at all. Diffusers don’t require a power source or working electronics, and this means that physical damage to the diffusers themselves is the only issue that will render them unusable.

Using monitor diffusers to create photography lighting is affordable and easy. You just need to get your hands on some LED strips to get started, and there are plenty of guides around the web to help you through the process. This type of lighting is perfect for photography, videography, and even live-streaming.

Smart mirrors have been the subject of much excitement around the web in recent years. Like something out of the pages of a sci-fi novel, smart mirrors offer a glimpse of the future, turning a usually boring household item into something more. You can use your smart mirror to check the weather, catch up on news, and even shop for your next outfit, all while staring your beautiful self in the face.

Like the first idea we covered, your old monitor needs to be in relatively good condition to work as a smart mirror. You can choose from mirrors small and large, as long as you are able to remove the backing of the mirror your choose and expose the clear glass it is made from.

Raspberry Pis are perfect for powering smart mirrors. These mini-computers are powerful enough to perform basic tasks, while also being affordable. You can check out some of the best LCD smart mirror projects around the web with our handy guide.

Wireless speakers are great, giving you the power to take music whenever you go. Of course, though, who wants to buy new speakers when they have an old or broken monitor with great speakers built-in? This video shows you how to turn your old monitor or TV speakers into a wireless Bluetooth speaker with a soldering iron, some batteries, and a Bluetooth module.

Building a DIY Bluetooth speaker is easier than it used to be, but there are still things to keep in mind. You need to have the right type of speaker connections available for this to work, and your finished device won’t have advanced features like waterproofing. With that aside, this project is fun and easy to take on for yourself.

Drawing, arts and crafts, and other types of DIY projects often benefit from a good light source. Artists have taken advantage of light tables for a very long time, providing a backlight for artwork that makes it much easier to see what you are doing. You don’t have to buy a specialized light table when you have a broken monitor available to you.

This Instructables guide shows you everything you need to do to create a light table with a broken monitor. The panel doesn’t have to work for this, but you need to make sure that the backlight is still functional. Light tables are great for a variety of artistic activities, from drawing and painting to playing with the kids.

If you finished school more than a decade ago, you probably remember old-fashioned overhead projectors. Having made way for modern digital projectors, old overheads are very cheap to buy online and can make a great DIY project for those with an old monitor.

Overhead projectors work by shining light through a semi-transparent sheet and reflecting it through a lens and set of mirrors. Anything on the sheet will appear on the wall the projector is pointing at. By turning your monitor into a transparent LCD, like in the first project we looked at, you can make a static overhead projector into something much more.

You need a dark room for this to work properly, and you will also need to buy a couple of parts online. Once you close the curtains and find some good speakers to use, though, you can create your own home cinema without spending much at all.

Recycling the broken tech in your home is one of the best ways to have a positive impact on the environment. With more than 60 million tons of e-waste being shipped across the world each year, it always makes sense to embrace DIY projects that reuse old gadgets. Your broken monitor is the perfect place to start, but you can apply this to other objects, too.

Well, not only can you save a piece of old technology from the scrapheap, but you also can repurpose a mundane blank screen into a range of intriguing projects.

Not only can you now spend a rainy afternoon or two taking apart your busted LCD screen, you’ll get that insider’s view of all the interesting circuitry that goes into these electronic devices that are a part of everyday life.

If you are an artist or photographer, you will be well aware of the importance and expense of lighting. But what if we told you that you could make a powerful, portable DIY light panel from an old LCD screen?

This amazing LCD screen hack produces a high-quality panel light that radiates daylight quality light. An equivalent panel light can cost well over a hundred dollars!

We have to admit we were skeptical about this LCD screen project, but the walk-through provided by the BrunaLab team in Florida was convincing. These scientists were more than qualified to take apart an old Panasonic screen to make a StarTrek-worthy infinity table.

This tutorial is a little more than purchasing some IKEA table legs to screw into the screen to make a coffee table (the original hack). Emilio Bruna decided to take his project in a high art direction to produce an infinity lighting effect with blue LEDs.

Again with a little electronic know-how, wiring and battery-powered LED lights an infinity TV coffee table was born. The turnaround of this project was within a day which makes it doable on a weekend that you have free.

We love the futuristic results of the LCD recycling project and the low costs. Emilio Bruna’s project came in at $73 all in, with a wacky blue lighting pattern that kept his kids glued to the coffee table screen!

If you are a tech and electronics enthusiast, you will be aware of the Raspberry Pi revolution. These remarkable single-board computers have the processing power to be put to work in a wide range of projects, including partnering with your broken LCD screen to make your high-end digitized smart mirror!

There are loads of tutorials for this LCD screen mirror which vary in cost, complexity, and overall swagger. The majority of them, place the LCD screen behind a two-way mirror and rely on the WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi3.

The basics of this build include combining an old OHP projector and laying a stripped-down LCD on the glass of the projector. The OHP does all the hard work of projecting your movie or game.

The like the old school OHPs the visual effect of this projector will be strongest in very low light as the claim to High Definition projection may be a little too enthusiastic.

Also, the LCD does age quite quickly in this arrangement as the light passing through the denuded screen damages the LCD. However, you can definitely gather the family round for a decent movie night or two before it all falls apart!

Raspberry Pi comes to the rescue again as the perfect partner for repurposing your own screen. After all the Raspberry Pi is a computer with no screen to call its own.

This hack is very similar to the smart mirror and uses the slightly more powerful Raspberry Pi 4 which has the comparable processing power to a regular computer.

This project totally blew us away. How cool is a transparent screen that you can see through while you stream films or play games?! Though this project is not for amateurs it is possible to requisition a discarded LCD TV and create a see-through screen.

To achieve this, you will need an expert takedown of the TV, sepearating every single layer of the screen and building up a custom design and housing.

A broken LCD screen is a potential hazard to your health and the environment so it is important that you handle the screen safely to prevent injury or harm.

Though the screen has liquid crystal, the amount contained within a busted screen is small and unlikely to cause a hazardous spill because it is viscous.

However, there are certain substances to be careful off including N-(4-Methoxybenzylidene)-4-butylaniline (MBBA), a compound that is often used as liquid crystal is hightly irritant and can cause blood poisoning if ingested.

It is best to wear gloves, goggles, and a dust mask when taking apart electronics as you cannot be sure what you will encounter. Be careful handling circuit boards as capacitors can have retained enough power to give you a nasty shock!

According to researchersDr. L.D. Rosenblum, Dr. Harold Stolovitch and Dr. Erica Keeps, here is the breakdown of how our five sense processes information:

Clearly, human beings are highly visual in nature, and this is a fact that is particularly important when you’re running a physical store. One of the main reasons why people decide to shop offline is to see merchandise in person, and this is all the more reason to design winning retail displays.

The best way to make a lasting impression is to immerse your customers in a particular environment or setting. Check out the example below. The displays themselves are simple, and the retailer only makes use of a few simple racks and fixtures.

But because all the other elements of the store (i.e., the color of the walls, the cold-weather items, and the text “it’s cold outside”)  follow a unifying theme, the overall effect is quite powerful. It engulfs customers into the “cool” theme of the store, creating an immersive experience.

Keep this example in mind for your next display. Recognize that you don’t necessarily have to build something fancy. If you have a strong theme and ensure that all the components of your shop are in line with the story you want to tell, you can create a compelling and immersive experience using just a few simple products and fixtures.

In a survey by Ripen eCommerce, they found that the top reason people shop in brick and mortar stores instead of ecommerce is that physical retail enables shoppers to touch and feel items in person.

The key takeaway here? Create displays that encourage people to touch and feel for you products. If your items are sitting on a shelf or a table while still inside their respective boxes, you could be missing the chance to connect with your customers.

So, take your products out of their packaging and get shoppers to really experience your merchandise. Ulta Beauty, for example, does this with their hairdryers. While other stores keep the products in their boxes, Ulta has their hairdryers out for people to touch and feel them.

Need an easy and affordable way to breathe life into your visual merchandising? Use plants. Doing so doesn’t just make your displays more attractive, they can also create healthier and more pleasant shopping experiences.

In an interview with Retail Focus, Joey-Michelle Hutchinson, associate vice president at CallisonRTKL, said that having more greeneries in retail environments “makes them feel more inviting, which in turn decreases customer stress levels and increases their dwell time.”

Having more “green” displays clearly has some benefits, so consider incorporating plants into your designs.For inspiration, look no further than homeware retailer Harper & Grey House. Plants are a staple in their displays and the greens do a tremendous job in accentuating their merchandise.

Cross-merchandising is a subtle but effective way toincrease basket sizes and average order values. The practice promotes product discovery and entices shoppers to look at items that complement what they’re already buying.

There are a number of ways to implement cross-merchanding. One is to merchandise items that go together. You could, for example, create a display with a blouse, jacket, and matching purse.

Another idea? Display gift cards next to relevant products. Have a look at what Target is doing. The retailer has some baby-centric gift cards next to some toys in the store’s baby section to remind shoppers about their gift cards.

Speaking of little ones, have you considered creating kid-friendly displays? The practice can be quite effective particularly if you cater to Gen X and Millennial consumers.

Even the most creative displays will fall flat when they’re not well-lit. So invest, in the equipment to make sure that your products are displays in the best possible light.

Is your store on the small side? Consider using portable displays so you can make better use of your space. Such displays are easier to move so you can quickly re-merchandise your shop or make room for other things if necessary.

Portable displays can also help in keeping your visual merchandising focused and on-point. Since you have limited space, you’re forced to only display the most important and most high-impact products.

The following cookware display at Crate & Barrel does exactly that. The top part of the display has images of the items for sale along with a quick description of what each product is and what it does.

Colors can make or break your retail displays, which is why it’s essential to select the right color scheme. A big part of this will be driven by the colors of your products. If most of your items are come in pastel shades for instance, then those colors will be quite common in your displays.

That being said, how those products are displayed together matters a great deal. There are various ways to mix and match colors, so have a think about how you’ll do it in your displays.

The folks at Live By The Sword salon did an amazing job merchandising their shelf of Amika products, which come in a variety of colors.By really leaning into the colorful nature of Amika’s items, they were able to set up a vibrant display that pops.

Take this example from The LifeStyled Company. The team created a display featuring Babe Australia’s products, most of which come with predominantly white boxes and labels.

Timely displays are sure to grab the attention of your customers. Keep a close eye on your retail calendar and make sure that your visual merchandising coincides with relevant shopping events and seasons.

For instance, during last year’s back-to-school season, Target dedicated an entire corner to school supplies and relevant merchandise. The area of the store was filled with large, back-to-school displays that were impossible to miss.

If you’re running multiple stores, make sure your displays reflect the tastes and preferences of each location. Pay attention to local trends and popular products in the area and ensure they’re front and center in your displays.

You can shed light on these insights using your POS reporting and retail analytics. Identify the top categories or items in different cities and use the data to inform your merchandising decisions.

It also helps to call out the name of each town or city. For instance, the homeware retail chain Home Goods has a sign that reads, “Happy to Be in Cerritos” in its Cerritos branch.

Got a bunch of quotable quotes up your sleeve? See if you can incorporate them into your retail displays. When done right, a bit of text can complement your products and encourage shoppers to take a closer look.

And as a bonus, walls or displays with quotable quotes are a magnet for Instagram users. With the right display, you’re bound to gain a bunch of social shares and tags along the way.

If you’re looking for ways to showcase your full product lines without cramming your shelves and racks with too much merchandise, then see if you can use technology to “extend” your displays.

Case in point: when the online retailerShowpolaunched their pop-up store in Los Angeles, they chose to display a small selection of products in the shop.

Showpo even took things a step further and used another table to capture customers’ details in-store. To encourage people to provide their email, they threw a 15% discount that can be redeemed online.

In retail, space conveys value. The more space there is in a store or display, the higher the perceived value of the merchandise. This why many luxury retailers display items in standalone cases while discount stores overstuff their shelves with merchandise.

The right amount of space to use in your store depends on how you want to be perceived. But one thing is clear: if don’t want people to think that your products are cheap, then you’ll want to use fewer items in your display.

Take a look at this window fromSaks Fifth Avenue. The display features a single mannequin and table on which there’s just one pair of shoes. Aside from the paintings on the right, there aren’t a lot of details to distract people from the products.

Upcycling — the practice of using old or discarded materials to create something new — can help you build out-of-the-box retail displays. In the example below, we can see that the retailer used old chairs to create racks on which to hang their merchandise.

Now, don’t get us wrong: traditional racks and fixtures are still essential. But hopefully, this example encourages you to reimagine the use of old items. You never know — that old chair, box, or frame could be just the thing that would get your display to stand out.

If you’re celebrating a special holiday or occasion in your store, use your shop displays to show your festive side. Materials like balloons, tassels, garlands and other party supplies could help your displays pop.

With retail being more competitive than ever, there’s just no room for uninspired and mediocre retail displays. Now, more than ever, you need to constantly cook up in-store visuals can stop people in their tracks and encourage them to buy, share, and come back.

And remember that no matter what kind of display you have, it won’t be effective if it doesn’t showcase merchandise that your customers want to buy. That’s why it’s important to make data-backed decisions when it comes to merchandising. Use your POS or inventory management system to generate sales and product reports that will inform your decisions around what items to show off in your store.

Francesca Nicasio is Vend"s Retail Expert and Content Strategist. She writes about trends, tips, and other cool things that enable retailers to increase sales, serve customers better, and be more awesome overall. She"s also the author of Retail Survival of the Fittest, a free eBook to help retailers future-proof their stores. Connect with her on LinkedIn, Twitter, or Google+.

The Arduino board has a wide variety of compatible displays that you can use in your electronic projects. In most projects, it’s very useful to give the user some sort of feedback from the Arduino.

With the TFT display you can display colorful images or graphics. This module has a resolution of 480 x 320. This module includes the SD card socket and SPI FLASH circuit.

This is a tiny display with just 1 x 0.96 Inch. This display has a black background, and displays characters in white. There are other similar displays that can show the characters in other colors.

Equipped with IPS Screen with HD 1024*600 high resolution, 16:9 display format conversion in the image and an expansive 178 degree viewing angles is ideal for work and for reviewing on-screen data.

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LCD display screens are everywhere. You probably own one or more devices with an LCD display screen at home and at work. This includes your TV, computer monitor, watches, clocks, smartphones, and even calculators.

But have you ever wondered about how your LCD display screen works, its lifespan, components, and how it holds up to other emerging display technologies today?

Knowing all these things about your LCD display lets you appreciate your screen all the more. Caring for your device becomes easier when you’re armed with this knowledge.

LCD display screens make use of Liquid Crystal Display technology. The screen is embedded with liquid crystals, a substance that has properties in between a conventional liquid and a solid crystal. Liquid crystals can flow, but their molecules carry a crystal-like solid orientation.

Liquid crystals are responsible for producing an image flashed onto the LCD screen. They don’t emit light, though. Backlights are used to illuminate these crystals.

Every pixel on the display screen is made up of red, blue, and green light. These lights can be quickly turned on or off to create an overall moving picture or image.

Now, in LCD displays, pixels are regulated by using liquid crystals for rotating polarized light. Polarized light denotes light waves with vibrations occurring in a single plane. In LCDs, this is achieved by using polarized layers.

Each pixel has polarizing filters on both its front and back. Tiny nematic (twisted) liquid crystals are placed in between these filters. The liquid crystals can be switched on or off electronically through tiny electronic transistors.

When the liquid crystal is turned off, electricity controlled by the transistor stops flowing. The pixel is then turned on, brightening up due to the 90-degree twisting of the nematic liquid crystal. This allows light to pass through both polarizing filters on the pixel, illuminating the pixel by letting light pass through.

A single LCD contains millions of pixels, nematic liquid crystals, polarizing filters, and transistors. They all work together to create images on the screen.

Most LCD monitors have a lifespan ranging from 30,000 to 60,000 hours. That’s equivalent to 5-7 years using the monitor for 24 hours per day. It could also translate to 10-20 years with running the monitor for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

The backlight’s life expectancy is the biggest factor in determining the LCD display lifespan. It’s because liquid crystals do not give off light from themselves. The liquid crystals depend on the backlight for illuminating them. Hence, the LCD screen wears off when the backlights dim as it reaches its maximum lifespan.

The backlight serves as the illuminator of the entire LCD display device. Without a backlight, the LCD device remains darkened and hard to use. Backlights are installed directly behind the LCD panel to lighten up the display.

Simple devices such as pocket calculators don’t use a backlight for their LCD screens. Users rely on natural light to see the numbers displayed on such calculators. However, the majority of modern LCD screens such as televisions, computer monitors, smartphones, aviation screen panels, outdoor signages, and medical monitoring devices use backlights as their internal light source.

This type of backlight is the most popular and widely-used light source for LCDs today. Light-emitting diodes are semiconductors that emit light once electric current flows into it. Particles carrying the electric current are called electrons holes. These combine with electrons in the semiconductor, releasing photons (light particles).

Band separations called bandgaps determine the photons’ energy. Furthermore, the photon’s energy dictates which color the LED emits, depending on the emitted light’s wavelength. Various kinds of semiconductors and their corresponding varying bandgaps create different light colors.

Edge-Lit White LED (EL-WLED)– One or more LED rows are placed on the screen’s edge. A special light diffuser is used to scatter the light evenly across the entire display screen. Computer monitors, laptops, notebooks, and even HDTVs are now lit in this way.

White LED (WLED)– The LCD panel’s rear side is lit up with several white-colored LEDs. A diffuser is set in front of the LEDs to help evenly smooth out the light throughout the screen. Some computer monitors and large-screen LCD TVs use this LED technology.

ELP uses electroluminescent materials such as colored phosphors instead of heat to create light. This material is placed in between two conductor layers. The material emits light as a result of an electric current flowing through it. ELPs are mostly used in small LCD screens.

CCFL backlight uses a cold cathode fluorescent lamp as its main light source. This lamp consists of a cathode that isn’t heated electrically by a filament, hence the connotation “cold”.  A diffuser is placed in front of the CCFL lamp to evenly distribute light across the entire screen.

The cathodes used in CCFL produce light by creating a non-heated thermionic emission of electrons. This is accomplished by using discharges in mercury vapor to create an ultraviolet light. This light, in turn, creates a fluorescent coating inside the lamp, resulting in visible light.

Computer monitors and TV screens predominantly used CCFLs for backlights. However, modern manufacturers opt for LED technology instead of CCFL for their devices’ backlights.

HCFL backlights have filaments that need to be heated to excite mercury atoms, cause the current to flow, and ultimately emit light. HCFLs are often used in LCD equipment such as medical devices, custom task-oriented lamps, scanners, and outdoor LCD signs.

Liquid crystals are the heart of an LCD display. This unique substance flows like a liquid but retains many characteristics of solid crystals. They have long and cylindrical-shaped molecules that can twist when changes in molecular orientation happen.

Different liquid crystal families are used in LCD displays. One requirement of such liquids is to exhibit mutual attraction. Also, the molecules in the liquid crystal need to be anisotropic. This means that the liquid crystal molecules have that average structural order along a molecular axis.

Liquid crystals are often sandwiched in between the color filters and the polarizers. They twist and straighten in response to electrical currents applied to them. The movement of liquid crystals controls whether polarized light will pass through the filters or not.

The nematic phase is characterized by the crystal molecules freely moving around the liquid. However, these molecules point themselves to one direction only, making it unique from pure liquid molecules. Nematic liquid crystals are the most common liquid used in LCD screens.

In the smectic phase, the liquid crystals keep their similar orientation and direction. But the molecules are now lining themselves into layers. The smectic layers have restricted movement, creating a solid-like state in the liquid crystals.

Also known as the chiral nematic phase, the cholesteric phase happens when the liquid crystal molecules align themselves at a slight angle to each other. The molecules become stacked in very thin layers as well. The cholesteric phase also allows molecules to change color from exposure to different temperatures.

Now, molecules in liquid crystals move as a reaction to an electric field. Their arrangement changes as a voltage are applied to them. This allows liquid crystals to control polarized light, which, in turn, defines which pixels on a screen will be illuminated or not.

Color filters are found in between the liquid crystals. These filters determine whether the pixel shows red, green, or blue colors when activated. The filters work by independently controlling the pixel’s red, green, and blue sub-pixels. With this, the LCD screen can reproduce all possible colors found in the color space.

An LCD cell is made up of two polarizing filters. They enclose the LCD display and color filters. One polarizing filter is located in front of the backlight and is horizontal in orientation. The other one is found just beneath the pixel in front and is vertical in orientation. Polarizing filters are typically made of transparent crystals or glass substrates.

The role of polarizing filters is to control which light patterns can pass through the LCD screen. Without these filters, visual images generated by the LCD panel will have a poor contrast ratio and an inferior quality image.

Meanwhile, if the LCD display is arranged in a straightened way, the horizontal light waves that came from the first polarizing filter will be blocked from entering the vertical polarizing filter. The pixel is then turned off and no light illuminates it.

The two polarizing filters need to be vertical and horizontal in orientation, respectively. If the filters are oriented in the same way (ie; both horizontal or both vertical) will block all the light passing through, displaying nothing on the screen.

TFTs are responsible for providing electrical voltage to the LCD display. Each screen pixel has a corresponding transistor, enabling the pixels to easily be controlled in unison through changes in electrical current.

Using TFTs requires less charge and less power to operate the LCD display screen successfully. TFT use also leads to sharper images because each pixel has its own transistor controlling it. The charge given to a certain pixel can be actively maintained even if the screen is refreshed to display another image.

That’s all the basic information you need to know about LCD display screens. Now, you know how an LCD screen works, its possible lifespan, its components, and how it compares to other display technologies.

Armed with this information, you can better appreciate and take care of your LCD display devices. And in case you’re planning to add display devices to your business, the information you’ve learned will help you make educated choices regarding the display technologies you’ll utilize.

Gaming monitors are designed to make the output of your graphics card and CPU look as good as possible while gaming. They"re responsible for displaying the final result of all of your computer"s image rendering and processing, yet they can vary widely in their representation of color, motion, and image sharpness. When considering what to look for in a gaming monitor, it"s worth taking the time to understand everything a gaming monitor can do, so you can translate gaming monitor specs and marketing into real-world performance.

Display technology changes over time, but the basic goals of monitor manufacturers remain consistent. We"ll break down each group of monitor features below to isolate their benefits.

Resolution is a key feature of any monitor. It measures the width and height of the screen in terms of pixels, or “picture elements”, the tiny points of illumination that compose an image. A 2,560 × 1,440 screen, for example, has a total of 3,686,400 pixels.

Common resolutions include 1,920 × 1,080 (sometimes called “Full HD” or FHD), 2,560 × 1,440 (“Quad HD”, QHD, or “Widescreen Quad HD”, WQHD), or 3840 × 2160 (UHD, or “4K Ultra HD”). Ultrawide monitors are also available with resolutions such as 2560 x 1080 (UW-FHD) and 3440 x 1440 (UW-QHD), 3840x1080 (DFHD), and 5120x1440 (DQHD).

Sometimes manufacturers only reference one measurement for standard resolutions: 1080p and 1440p refer to height, while 4K refers to width. Any resolution higher than 1,280 × 720 is high definition (HD).

The pixels being counted in these measurements are usually rendered the same way: As squares on a two-dimensional grid. To see this, you can either move closer to (or magnify) the screen until you perceive individual blocks of color, or zoom in on an image until it becomes “pixelated”, and you see a staircase of small squares instead of clean diagonal lines.

As you increase your display resolution, it gets harder to pick out individual pixels with the naked eye, and the clarity of the picture increases in turn.

Beyond increasing the detail onscreen in games or movies, there"s another benefit to higher resolutions. They give you more desktop real estate to work with. That means you get a larger workspace on which to arrange windows and applications.

You might already know that a screen with 4K display resolution doesn"t magically make everything it displays look 4K. If you play a 1080p video stream on it, that content usually won"t look as good a 4K Blu-ray. However, it may still look closer to 4K than it used to, thanks to a process called upscaling.

Upscaling is a way to scale lower-resolution content to a higher resolution. When you play a 1080p video on a 4K monitor, the monitor needs to “fill in” all of the missing pixels that it expects to display (as a 4K monitor has four times as many pixels as 1080p). A built-in scaler interpolates new pixels by examining the values of surrounding pixels. HDTVs often feature more complex upscaling than PC monitors (with line-sharpening and other improvements), as the latter often simply turn one pixel into a larger block of the same pixels. The scaler is likely to cause some blurring and ghosting (double images), especially if you look closely.

Monitors can also change resolution. Modern screens have a fixed number of pixels, which defines their "native resolution" but can also be set to approximate lower resolutions. As you scale down, onscreen objects will look larger and fuzzier, screen real estate will shrink, and visible jaggedness may result from interpolation. (Note that it wasn’t always this way: older analog CRT monitors can actually switch between resolutions without interpolation, as they do not have a set number of pixels.)

Screens with 4K resolution and higher introduce another scaling concern: at ultra-high definition, text and interface elements like buttons can start to look small. This is especially true on smaller 4K screens when using programs that don’t automatically resize their text and UI.

Windows’ screen scaling settings can increase the size of text and layout elements, but at the cost of reducing screen real estate. There’s still a benefit of increased resolution, even when this scaling is used — onscreen content, like an image in an editing program, will appear at 4K resolution even if the menus around it have been rescaled.

Manufacturers measure screen size diagonally, from corner to corner. A larger screen size, in tandem with a higher resolution, means more usable screen space and more immersive gaming experiences.

Players sit or stand close to their monitors, often within 20”-24”. This means that the screen itself fills much more of your vision than an HDTV (when seated at the couch) or a smartphone/tablet. (Monitors boast the best ratio of diagonal screen size to viewing distance among common displays, with the exception of virtual reality headsets). The benefits of 1440p or 4K resolution are more immediately perceptible in this close-range situation.

Basically, you want to find a screen where you never perceive an individual pixel. You can do this using online tools that measure pixel density (in pixels per inch), which tells you the relative “sharpness” of the screen by determining how closely pixels are packed together, or the alternative pixels per degree formula, which automatically compares its measurements against the limits of human vision.

It"s also worth considering your own eyesight and desktop setup. If you have 20/20 vision and your eyes are around 20” from your screen, a 27” 4K panel will provide an immediate visual upgrade. However, if you know your eyesight is worse than 20/20, or you prefer to sit more than 24” away, a 1440p panel may look just as good to you.

A monitor"s aspect ratio is the proportion of width to height. A 1:1 screen would be completely square; the boxy monitors of the 1990s were typically 4:3, or “standard”. They have largely been replaced by widescreen (16:9) and some ultrawide (21:9, 32:9, 32:10) aspect ratios.

Most online content, such as YouTube videos, also defaults to a widescreen aspect ratio. However, you"ll still see horizontal black bars onscreen when watching movies or TV shows shot in theatrical widescreen (2.39:1, wider than 16:9), and vertical black bars when watching smartphone videos shot in thinner “portrait” mode. These black bars preserve the original proportions of the video without stretching or cropping it.

UltrawidesWhy opt for an ultrawide screen over regular widescreen? They offer a few advantages: They fill more of your vision, they can provide a movie-watching experience closer to the theater (as 21:9 screens eliminate “letterboxing” black bars for widescreen films), and they let you expand field of view (FOV) in games without creating a “fisheye” effect. Some players of first-person games prefer a wider FOV to help them spot enemies or immerse themselves in the game environment. (But note that some popular FPS games do not support high FOV settings, as they can give players an advantage).

Curved screens are another common feature on ultrawide monitors. These can correct one typical issue with larger ultrawides: Images at the distant edges of the screen look less distinct than those in the middle. A curved screen helps compensate for this and provides a clearer view of the extreme edges of the screen. However, its benefits are most noticeable on larger screens over 27”.

When viewing two monitors side-by-side, it"s sometimes easy to see which has more brilliant hues, deeper blacks, or a more lifelike color palette. It can be harder to put the picture together in your head when reading specifications, however, because color in monitors is evaluated in many different ways. There"s no one spec to focus on: Contrast ratio, brightness, black level, color gamut, and more all come into play. Before moving on to larger color features, let"s define these terms one-by-one.

Contrast RatioContrast ratio, one of the most basic measures of a monitor"s performance, measures the ratio between the extremes of black and white that the screen can display. A baseline contrast ratio like 1,000:1 means that the white parts of the image are 1,000 times brighter than the dark parts.

When it comes to contrast ratios, higher numbers are better. A high contrast ratio, like 4,000:1, means bright highlights, inky blacks, and dark areas where details are still perceptible. A contrast ratio of 200:1, on the other hand, means that the blacks look more like grays, and the colors look faded and indistinct from each other.

Use caution when LCDs advertise very high “dynamic contrast ratios”, which are achieved by changing the behavior of the backlight. For gaming or everyday use, the standard “static” contrast ratio discussed above is a better marker of the monitor"s quality.

LuminanceBrightness is often measured in “luminance”, a precise measure of how much light is emitted by the screen. It"s given in candelas per square meter (cd/m2), a unit which is also called a “nit”. For HDR displays, the VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) has standardized a suite of tests for luminance using specific test patches. When comparing luminance specs, check to make sure they use this consistent test platform, rather than a proprietary metric.

Black LevelIn all LCD screens, light from the backlight inevitably leaks through the liquid crystal. This provides the basis for the contrast ratio: For example, if the screen leaks 0.1% of the illumination from the backlight in an area that"s supposed to be black, this establishes a contrast ratio of 1,000:1. An LCD screen with zero light leakage would have an infinite contrast ratio. However, this isn"t possible with current LCD technology.

“Glow” is a particular issue in dark viewing environments, which means that achieving low black levels is a major selling point for LCD monitors. However, an LCD screen can’t reach a black level of 0 nits unless it’s completely turned off.

OLEDs have incredible black levels because they don"t use backlights. When an OLED pixel isn"t activated by electricity, it creates no light at all. OLED screens may advertise black levels “below 0.0005 nits”, as taking measurements more precise is usually prohibitively expensive. However, the black level is usually much closer to 0 than 0.0005.

Color DepthMonitors need to display many subtle shades of color. If they can"t smoothly transition between slightly different hues, we see onscreen color “banding” — a stark shift between two different colors, creating visibly lighter, and darker bands where we should see a seamless gradient. This is sometimes referred to as “crushing” the colors.

A monitor"s ability to display many slightly different colors, and thus avoid banding and inaccuracy, is measured by color depth. Color depth specifies the amount of data (measured in bits) the screen can use to build the color of one pixel.

Each pixel onscreen has three color channels — red, green, and blue — illuminated at varying intensities to create (typically) millions of shades. 8-bit color means that each color channel uses eight bits. The total number of shades possible in a screen with 8-bit color depth is 28 x 28 x 28=16,777,216.

True 10-bit monitors are rare — many monitors use forms of internal color processing, such as FRC (frame rate control), to approximate a greater color depth. A “10-bit” monitor could be an 8-bit monitor with an additional FRC stage, often written as “8+2FRC”.

Some inexpensive LCD panels use 6-bit color along with “dithering” to approximate 8-bit color. In this context, dithering means the insertion of similar, alternating colors next to one another to fool the eye into seeing a different in-between color that the monitor cannot accurately display.

Frame Rate Control, or FRC, alternates different colors with each new frame to achieve this. While this can be implemented more cheaply than 8-bit True Color, color accuracy suffers, especially in low-light environments. Some screens also feature 8-bit color depth with an additional FRC stage (commonly listed as “8-bit + FRC”) to approximate 10-bit color.

Monitors sometimes feature a Look-Up Table (LUT) corresponding to a higher color depth, such as 10-bit color. This helps speed up color correction calculations that take place within the monitor as it converts color input to a color output appropriate for your screen. This intermediate step can help create smoother color transitions and more accurate output. These are usually reserved for more professional grade monitors than general consumer and gaming displays.

Color SpaceYou"ll often hear about a monitor"s color "space" or "gamut", which is different from its bit depth. The color space specifies the spectrum of colors that can appear, rather than just calculating the number of them.

Your eye can see a much wider spectrum of color than current displays can reproduce. To visualize all visible colors, a standard called CIE 1976 maps them to a grid, creating a horseshoe-shaped graph. The color gamuts available for monitors appear as subsets of this graph:

Common, mathematically defined color gamuts include sRGB, Adobe RGB, and DCI-P3. The first is a common standard for monitors (and the officially designated color space for the web). The second, wider standard is mostly used by photo and video editing professionals. The third, DCI-P3, is even wider, and is commonly used for HDR content.

Monitors advertising "99% sRGB" are claiming the screen covers 99% of the sRGB color gamut, which is often considered indistinguishable from 100% when viewed with the naked eye.

In LCD screens, the backlight and color filters determine the color space. All of the light created by the backlight passes through a color filter with red, green, and blue spots. Narrowing the “band-pass” of this filter restricts the wavelengths of light that can pass through, increasing the purity of the final colors produced. Although this lessens the screen"s efficiency (as the filter now blocks more of the backlight"s output), it creates a wider color gamut.

White LED (W-LED) backlight: A blue LED coated in yellow phosphors emits white light, which is filtered through red, green, and blue color channels to become the pixel"s final color. W-LED backlights produce a standard sRGB gamut color space. Sometimes an additional coating of special nanoparticles can be applied to a W-LED backlight to produce wider color gamut, often resulting in wider DCI-P3 color space coverage.

Quantum Dot Coating (QD): A blue LED backlight shines on green and red nanoparticles, which are manufactured to a tight tolerance. These emit a narrow frequency of green and red light. The nanoparticles don"t actually filter out light, which makes the process highly efficient. Instead, they convert and re-emit light on a narrow frequency range, which yields a wide color gamut.

HDR monitors display brighter images with better contrast and preserve more detail in both light and dark areas of the screen. Using an HDR monitor, you might be better able to spot something moving down a dark corridor in a horror game, or see more dramatic shafts of sunlight in an open-world title.

Though they work best with HDR content (which only some games and movies support), these monitors typically support 10-bit color depth and backlights that support a wide color gamut, which will also improve standard content (SDR). (Note that HDR monitors are often not true 10-bit color, but rather 8+2FRC displays that accept a 10-bit input signal).

For LCD displays, a high-end backlight feature called local dimming is critical to HDR quality. Dimming zones for the backlight behind the screen control the brightness of groups of LEDs; more dimming zones means more precise control, less “blooming” (where light areas of the image brighten dark ones), and generally improved contrast.

Edge-lit local dimming relies on groups of LEDs clustered around the edges of the screen to brighten or dim the image in what is typically a fairly limited number of dimming zones.

It can be tough to evaluate the quality of an HDR monitor on your own. You should rely on HDR standards like VESA’s DisplayHDR, which measures the relative quality of an HDR monitor by listing out specs like their dimming capability.

The DisplayHDR standard is more reliable than specs that are advertised as "Typical", as that wording allows manufacturers to list results that are true averages. Look for monitors that meet the minimum specification for different levels of DisplayHDR.

On the low end, a DisplayHDR 400 screen can have a peak brightness of 400 nits (compared to a 300-nit standard monitor), but only needs a standard 95% sRGB color gamut and 8-bit color depth. DisplayHDR 400 doesn"t require backlight local dimming.

OLED standards add additional requirements to showcase the technology"s deeper black levels. DisplayHDR True Black 400 and 500 require a black level below 0.0005 in addition to similar peak brightness standards.

Refresh rate is the frequency at which your entire screen refreshes the image. Higher refresh rates make onscreen motion look smoother, because the screen updates the position of each object more rapidly. This can make it easier for competitive players to track moving enemies in a first-person shooter, or just make a screen feel more responsive as you scroll down a webpage or open an app on your phone.

Response rates are measured in hertz: A response rate of 120Hz, for example, means that the monitor refreshes every pixel 120 times per second. While 60Hz was once the standard for both PC monitors and smartphones, manufacturers are increasingly adopting higher refresh rates.

The benefits of jumping from 60Hz to 120Hz or 144Hz are clear to most players, especially in fast-paced first-person games. (However, you"ll only see benefits if you also have a GPU powerful enough to render frames faster than 60fps at the resolution and quality settings you"ve chosen).

A higher refresh rate makes it easier to track moving objects with your eye, makes sharp camera movements feel smoother, and reduces perceived motion blur. Online communities are divided about the improvement provided by monitors over 120Hz. If interested, it"s worth checking one out in person to see how much of a difference it might make for you.

However, you"ll only actually see those extra frames onscreen if you have a refresh rate that matches or exceeds them; similarly, you only benefit from a high refresh rate screen if you have a CPU and graphics card capable of high frame rates. Plan your build accordingly to get the full benefit from your hardware.

Response time measures the time it takes a single pixel to change color in milliseconds. Lower response times mean fewer visual artifacts, such as motion blur or "trails" behind moving images.

Response times must be fast enough to keep up with the refresh rate. On a 240Hz screen, for example, a new frame is sent to the screen every 4.17 milliseconds (1000/240 = 4.17).

Manufacturers often list "gray-to-gray" response time — the time it takes for a pixel to change from one shade of gray to another. The quoted number often indicates the manufacturer"s best-case result from a battery of different tests, rather than a reliable average.

An image-sharpening process called overdrive also influences test results. Overdrive applies increased voltage to pixels to boost the speed of color changes. If adjusted carefully, overdrive can lessen visible trails and ghosting (a faint double image) during motion. If not, it may "overshoot" the intended values and cause other visual artifacts.

Turning overdrive up can yield better results on gray-to-gray tests, but can also create visual artifacts that aren"t disclosed when quoting the best number from those gray-to-gray tests. Due to all the factors affecting reported response times, it"s best to refer to independent reviewers, who can measure response time across different manufacturers.

Players sometimes confuse response time with input lag, a measurement of the delay before your actions appear onscreen, similarly measured in milliseconds. Input lag is felt rather than seen, and is often a priority for players of fighting games and first-person shooters.

Input lag is a side effect of the processing done by the monitor scaler and the screen"s internal electronics. Selecting “Game Mode” on your monitor"s adjustment menu often switches off image processing features and lessens input lag. Disabling VSync (which prevents some visual artifacts) in in-game option menus can also help reduce input lag.

Adaptive SyncScreen tears will be instantly familiar to most players: A graphical glitch that appears as a horizontal line on your screen, with slightly mismatched images above and below it.

The glitch involves both your graphics card and monitor. The GPU draws a varying number of frames per second, but the monitor refreshes its screen at a fixed rate. If the GPU is midway through overwriting the previous frame in the frame buffer when the monitor reads the frame buffer to refresh the screen, the monitor will display the mismatched image as-is. The top of the image might be a new frame, but the bottom section will still show the previous frame, creating the “tear”.

VSync (vertical sync) provides one solution to this issue. This in-game feature reduces the speed at which frames are drawn in order to match your monitor"s refresh rate. However, VSync can cause stuttering when the frame rate drops below that cap. (For example, the GPU may suddenly drop to 30fps when it can"t deliver 60fps). The increased load on the GPU can also result in input lag.

While improvements to VSync (such as NVIDIA"s Adaptive VSync*) have been made, two monitor technologies provide alternative solutions: NVIDIA G-Sync* and AMD Radeon FreeSync*. These technologies force your monitor to sync up with the GPU, rather than vice versa.

G-Sync monitors use NVIDIA"s proprietary G-Sync scaler chip to match monitor refresh rates to GPU output, as well as predict GPU output based on recent performance. It also helps prevent stutter and input lag, which can result from duplicate frames being drawn as the first one waits to be displayed.

AMD Radeon FreeSync monitors operate along similar lines, matching the display to GPU output to avoid screen tearing and stutters. Rather than using a proprietary chip, they"re built on open Adaptive Sync protocols, which have been built into DisplayPort 1.2a and all later DisplayPort revisions. Though FreeSync monitors are often cheaper, the trade-off is that they aren"t subject to standard testing before release, and vary widely in quality.

Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) is a general term for technologies that sync up your monitor and GPU. Adaptive Sync is an open protocol included in DisplayPort 1.2a and later revisions. Recent Intel, AMD, and NVIDIA graphics technologies can all work with Adaptive Sync monitors.

Both LCDs and OLEDs "sample and hold", displaying moving objects as a series of static images that are rapidly refreshed. Each sample remains onscreen until it"s replaced with the next refresh. This "persistence" causes motion blur, as the human eye expects to track objects smoothly rather than see them jump to a new position. Even at high refresh rates, which update the image more often, the underlying sample-and-hold technology causes motion blur.

Motion blur reduction features use backlight strobing to shorten the time that frame samples are displayed onscreen. The screen turns black after every sample before displaying the next, reducing the time that a static image is held onscreen.

This mimics the operation of older CRT monitors, which worked differently than current LCD technology. CRT screens were illuminated by phosphors that rapidly decayed, providing brief impulses of illumination. This meant that the screen was actually dark for most of the refresh cycle. These quick impulses actually created a smoother impression of motion than sample-and-hold, and motion blur reduction features work to replicate this effect.

Because the backlight is being rapidly turned off and on, these features also lessen the brightness of the display. If you"re planning to use motion blur reduction backlight strobing, ensure that the screen you"re buying has high peak brightness.

These backlights should only be enabled for gaming and fast-moving content, as they will deliberately cause the backlight to flicker, which may be annoying during day-to-day tasks. They also can typically only be used at a fixed refresh rate (like 120Hz), and won"t work at the same time as VRR.

Cathode Ray Tube (CRT)These boxy computer monitors were common from the 1970s until the early 2000s, and are still prized by some players today for their low input lag and response times.

CRTs used three bulky electron guns to send a beam to excite red, green, and blue phosphors on the screen. These phosphors decayed within a few milliseconds, meaning the screen was illuminated by brief impulses on each refresh. This created a smooth illusion of motion, but also visible flickering.

Liquid Crystal Display (LCD)In TFT LCDs (thin-film-transistor liquid crystal displays), a backlight shines light through a layer of liquid crystals that can twist, turn, or block it. The liquid crystals do not emit light themselves, which is a key dif