Better LCD Monitors

The LCD monitors are very popular these days because of their inherent advantages over the traditional cathodic tube displays (CRTs for short) and they truly offer something more to users like smaller footprint, less harmful radiations, lower energy consumption and less weight.

But LCD monitor are far from being perfect, they too have a few disadvantages of their own, namely a less rich color gamut and some constraining viewing angles. While the color problem is being resolved by every monitor manufacturer as best as it can, the viewing angle constraint remained un-addressed for quite a long time.

Until now, that is, as a research team from Taiwan came up with a solution by building a computer display that tracks the user's movements and readjusts itself in order to provide the best image, according to the news site NewsScientist.com. This technology should allow users that are viewing the LCD screen from an angle to see clear and sharp images and not the blurry and distorted usual ones. The prototype display is connected to a tiny video camera that tracks the location of the user and then a software calculates the needed adjustments in order to make a clear image. "Viewing angle is an inherent, fundamental problem for the LCD because of its working principle," says Wayne Cheng, who developed the prototype monitor in collaboration with Chih-Nan Wu at the Photonics and Display Institute, National Chiao Tung University in Taiwan.

The new LCD screen solves the viewing angle problem by placing a video camera right next to the display that will track the user's head movements, while a specialized software adjusts the orientation of the crystals inside the display as well as the power feeding the LEDs behind each pixel. According to its designers, this monitor shows promise and the use of a simpler IR camera that could track the position of a user's eyes would mean an easier and simpler way to implement this technology even in mobile and handheld devices.