Sharp Develops Highly-Innovative LCD with Touch Screen and Scanner Functions

The people from Sharp have always been in the forefront of technological research and development and the company's latest announcement proves this only very well. Thus, at IFA 2007, Sharp has unveiled a future LCD display that will most certainly change the way in which we perceive and use various mobile devices, due to the fact that it incorporates an optical sensor in just about every pixel of the LCD panel.

Thus, the new liquid crystal display system eliminates the need to bond a film to the panel for touch screen functions, and provides beautiful images without losing display image quality. This is becoming an especially important issue nowadays, due to the fact that an increasingly higher number of portable devices (whether we're talking about PDAs, smartphones, digital cameras and more) employ touch screens as the primary control system.

The most serious problem faced by touchscreen manufacturers is that laminating or bonding a film on top of the LCD panel (the most usual method of creating a touchscreen display) leads to reduced image quality and an increased size for the display section. However, according to Sharp, its newly developed technology could radically change that, due to the fact that it eliminates the need for films, resulting in a thinner, beautifully clear screen display compared to conventional touch screens.

Moreover, tactile recognition based on simultaneously touching multiple points on the screen is also supported (well, this is not exactly a novelty, but it's nevertheless important) and the device can also be used as a scanner for small-size documents. The new LCD display has a diagonal of 8.9 cm (3.5 inches), and provides a resolution of around 320 x 480 pixels.

The possible applications for this very innovative technology are quite numerous, but it's quite clear that these types of display will be used mostly in high-end mobile phones (like the iPhone or its successors), camcorders, UMPCs and more.

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